Agentic AI: The Next Tech Revolution

A Personal Beginning

“The funny thing about revolutions is that no one recognizes them while they’re happening. They feel like experiments, side projects—until one day, you realize the world has tilted on its axis.” - Terry Prachett

I didn’t know it then, but that was exactly what was happening the day I got my first email address. It was the fall of my sophomore year at Cornell University. The campus IT department had just rolled out Eudora accounts to students. They handed me a slip of paper with my new handle and a temporary password. I remember thinking it was… fine. Novel, maybe even handy for sending a quick note without a phone call. But no one was using email at scale.

I walked into the computer lab at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and logged on to the beige Macintosh, and typed my first message. I didn’t know it yet, but that simple act was my ticket into the early days of a revolution that would redefine business, culture, and the way humans connect.

Back then, the Internet didn’t feel like history in the making—it felt like a curiosity. And that’s what makes revolutions so strange: they rarely arrive with a drumroll. They sneak in quietly, then remake everything.

Then Comes the Boom

But after the quiet beginnings comes the noise.

In the late 1990s, the Internet went from being a niche utility for academics and hobbyists to the centerpiece of a speculative gold rush. Suddenly, every idea with a “.com” at the end attracted capital. Companies with little more than a business plan and a vague promise of “online disruption” were valued in the billions and signing VC deals on the back of napkins.

The pattern is as old as the Industrial Revolution: invention sparks curiosity, curiosity breeds adoption, adoption invites investment, and investment—fueled by FOMO—creates bubbles. The same thing happened with railroads in the 1800s, with radio in the 1920s, and with personal computers in the 1980s.

The hype is both a curse and a catalyst. It drives capital into the system far faster than fundamentals justify—but it also funds the infrastructure, talent, and experimentation that make the revolution stick long after the bubble bursts.

Agentic AI is now in this phase. The technology works—sometimes spectacularly—but the investment, marketing, and valuation froth is thick. History suggests that after the hype crests, we’ll see a period of cooling, consolidation, and quiet endurance. The survivors will be the companies building real, scalable value—just as Amazon, Google, and Salesforce emerged from the ashes of the dot-com crash.

In the dot-com boom, startup numbers climbed steadily but dramatically. Directories couldn’t keep pace. InternetWorld.com counted thousands of new web companies by 1999; many were still sketching out viable business models.

Today, the AI landscape is different in pace and scope. According to AscendixTech, there are over 70,000 AI-related companies worldwide in 2025—17,500 in the U.S. alone. Venture capital is flowing in torrents, with AI startups raising $100B+ in 2024. Global venture capital investment in AI for the first half of 2025 exceeded $205 billion, representing over 50% of all VC funding during that period. So the acceleration trend here couldn't be more obvious.

It feels like each successive industrial or technological "revolution" follows Moore's Law to a certain degree in that they come in half the time and are multiple times the scale of impact as the prior one with the steepest part of the exponential curve still to come.

“We are at the iPhone moment of AI.” — Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA

Below are some quick comparison's of the Internet Boom to the Current AI Bubble:

Venture Capital Funding: Internet vs AI

During the Internet boom, venture capital funding to tech firms jumped from around $5B in 1995 to $70B in 2000, before the bubble burst.

The AI boom is compressing that trajectory into half the time. PitchBook data shows AI accounted for one-half of all VC funding globally in 2025, with mega-rounds for OpenAI, Anthropic, and Inflection AI redefining early-stage funding norms.

The Economic Stakes

The Internet’s economic impact was massive, but took years to materialize. By 2009, McKinsey estimated it contributed 3.4% to GDP in large economies.

AI, according to PwC and McKinsey, could add up to $15.7T to the global economy by 2030—more than the GDP of China today.

“Agents are not only going to change how everyone interacts with computers… they’re proactive... they improve over time because they remember your activities.” — Bill Gates

The Human Side: Jobs and Society

In the dot-com years, many feared mass layoffs as technology ate retail, travel, and publishing. What followed was disruption—but also entirely new categories of work: web design, digital marketing, e-commerce logistics.

With AI, the potential reach is wider. Goldman Sachs research suggests up to 7% of global jobs could be displaced in the coming decade, especially in administrative and white-collar sectors. Interesting to note that the exact sector driving the change is where a significant amount of layoffs are happening with over 150,000 tech jobs being impacted last year.

“The future of AI is not about replacing humans, it’s about augmenting human capabilities.” — Sundar Pichai

“Without careful planning, AI could replace half of all white-collar jobs.” — Jim Farley

It will be interesting to see what the jobs of future will be created by this wave of innovation.

Below is a list of some potential possibilities:

AI Development & Maintenance Ecosystem

• Prompt Engineers / Interaction Designers: Specialists who craft natural language prompts, workflows, and conversational flows to get optimal results from AI systems.
• AI Trainers & Curators: People who fine-tune AI with domain-specific data, curate datasets, and enforce ethical guardrails.
• AI Quality Assurance Specialists: Professionals who test models for bias, accuracy, and safety, similar to today’s QA testers in software.
• Synthetic Data Designers: Experts who create high-quality synthetic datasets to overcome privacy and scarcity issues.

AI + Industry Hybrids

• AI Healthcare Navigators: Specialists who help patients and clinicians use AI safely for diagnosis, drug discovery, or personalized medicine.
• AI-Assisted Legal Analysts: Lawyers who specialize in reviewing AI-generated drafts/contracts while ensuring compliance.
• AI-Enhanced Educators: Teachers and instructional designers who integrate AI tutoring and personalization into classrooms.
• Creative AI Directors: People who orchestrate AI in art, film, gaming, and marketing campaigns.

Ethics, Regulation, and Trust

• AI Auditors: Professionals who ensure transparency and fairness in AI outputs.
• Algorithmic Ethicists: Specialists in navigating the societal impacts of AI, setting ethical frameworks within organizations.
• Regulatory Compliance Officers (AI-focused): Experts who ensure organizations adhere to evolving AI regulations.
• AI Reputation Managers: Professionals who monitor and manage brand perception as companies adopt AI.

Human-AI Collaboration Roles

• Cognitive Interface Designers: Experts who shape how humans and AI share work, ensuring ergonomics, trust, and efficiency.
• Workflow Orchestrators: Specialists who design hybrid processes (human + AI + robotic automation).
• Personal AI Managers: People who help individuals customize, train, and safeguard their personal AI assistants.

Entirely New Sectors

• Synthetic Reality Designers: Jobs in creating virtual worlds, immersive AI-driven environments, and hyper-personalized simulations.
• Neuro-AI Integrators: Specialists working on brain-computer interfaces (BCI) that blend human cognition with AI augmentation.
• AI Maintenance Services: Like how IT support became ubiquitous, we may see “AI plumbers” who fix, upgrade, and maintain AI systems for businesses and consumers.
• AI Arbitration Specialists: Professionals mediating disputes where AI recommendations or automated decisions are contested.

Jobs That Might Scale With AI

• Microtask Entrepreneurs: Platforms will emerge where individuals run niche services powered by AI (hyper-local journalism, AI fitness coaching, personalized travel planning).
• AI Companion Developers: Creating emotionally intelligent AI for companionship, therapy, or coaching.
• AI Green Tech Engineers: Designing energy-efficient AI infrastructure and sustainable applications.

Key takeaway? The AI revolution won’t just “replace” jobs — it will shift labor into new domains, much like how the internet created roles that were unimaginable in 1980. The biggest winners will likely be people who blend human judgment + creativity + AI fluency. While it appears that software / AI will eat everything, the next two decades may be defined by the physical manifestation of the AI in the real world: robotics.

Stories from Two Eras

Dot-com Banner Waver: theGlobe.com — Founded in 1995, it went public in 1998 with a 606% first-day stock price increase—still the record. Within two years, it had collapsed.

AI Banner Waver: ChatGPT — Launched by OpenAI in November 2022, it reached 100 million users in two months—the fastest adoption of any consumer app.

Infrastructure: Picks and Axes, Razors and Razorblades

In every revolution, there is the technology driving it and the infrastructure required to support it. "There is gold in them there hills" for those who build businesses that serve as the enablement layer.

Internet era: Cisco, Sun Microsystems, AWS.

AI era: NVIDIA (compute), cloud hyperscalers (Are Data Centers Back?), LLM infrastructure platforms (Scale AI).

“AGI could be here within five to ten years and cause societal transformation ‘10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution.’” — Demis Hassabis

Where This Goes Next

The Internet gave us the ability to share information instantly. Agentic AI gives us the ability to act instantly—delegating reasoning, planning, AND execution to machines.

The question isn’t whether AI will change the world. It’s whether we’ll shape it with the foresight the Internet era lacked—building governance, ethics, and inclusivity into the foundation.

If the Internet was the “information superhighway,” Agentic AI might be the autonomous vehicle driving it—taking us further and faster, but requiring trust in its judgment and skill.

I have been using AI everyday as we build an AI driven business at Cairns Health. Even though many are using it early and often, AI is still relatively immature in its development. It is both scary and exciting to imagine where AI could potentially impact our futures as we live through its evolution in the present.