agentic labour.

Everybody is talking about agentic AI. Almost nobody is talking about who actually does the work.

The promise is an agent that acts for you. The reality is that you act for it. You prompt. You correct. You check. You clean up after it. So who is the agent here, and who is the principal?

I should know. I even gave my AI assistants names. On a good day I manage them. On a normal day they manage me.

We call it automation when the machine does the task, augmentation when the human does it faster. Much of what is sold as agentic AI is still augmentation wearing automation's clothes.

And the work you do around it is not free. Every prompt, every correction, every workflow you hand over teaches the factory where you will become dependent. You are not only the customer. You are the unpaid shift that makes the product better.

There is another road. Local first. Intelligence you run on a machine you own, without asking a factory for permission. The point is not to refuse AI. The point is to stop renting your own mind by the month.

Agentic AI is real. So is agentic labour. We are doing both at once and only one of them shows up in the keynote.