About your job, can we put a pin in that?

The rise of AI agents in Wave Two is redefining work, eliminating traditional roles, and reshaping industries faster than we’re prepared for.

COMPUTER SCIENCECULTURECORPORATIONSAIPHILOSOPHY

Jared Lukes

1/13/20253 min read

The Agentic Revolution Is Here

There’s a new buzzword heading straight for your ears: AGENTS. As AI barrels into its next evolution, agents are the harbingers of Wave Two. Unlike their predecessor—static, one-shot models that deliver outputs in isolated bursts—agents loop, iterate, and refine. They are recursive systems orchestrating logic in real-time, chaining together tasks across multiple AI models until perfection is achieved.

It’s not just ChatGPT or Grok responding to a single query anymore; it’s cycles of intelligence working in tandem, turning business logic into agentic workflows. One model analyzes a vision system, another translates it into actionable data, while yet another refines and completes the cycle. It’s fast, scalable, and unrelenting—and it’s here to replace human labor like never before.

Agents Everywhere

In the next year, you’ll hear the word “agent” as often as you hear “AI.” I’m building a website right now that doesn’t even have 1 traditional HTML page. Agents dynamically construct pages on the fly, tailoring each visit to the user’s experience. No predefined structure, no static navigation—just real-time decisions made by an intelligent agentic system.

For now, I can get away with this for selling art. The uniqueness adds to the charm. But imagine this tech applied across industries: in customer service, in education, in medical interfaces. Agents will disrupt not just how we interact digitally but also how we design experiences altogether.

Five years ago, I told a room full of design leaders that UI and UX would be designed on the fly by AI systems. They laughed me out of the room. Who’s laughing now?

Goodbye, Traditional Systems

We’ve spent decades building digital hierarchies to manage data—rigid databases, predefined paths, and user flows. That’s about to become obsolete. These systems are being replaced by pure embedding systems, where everything is a vector, detached from traditional language or structure.

The implications are staggering. Think about the millions of workers in UX, customer experience, and code development. Their work is becoming moot. Agents handle outliers, adapt to edge cases, and deliver results faster than any team of humans could dream of.

The harder truth? Even jobs requiring creativity or expert knowledge are under threat. AI doesn’t just do the task once; it does it over and over until the result is flawless. That’s the real competition—repeatability and refinement at an unprecedented scale.

A Displacement Like No Other

Wave Two of AI doesn’t just threaten management jobs or repetitive tasks. It’s coming for white-collar, knowledge-based work and skills-based work. The same agent systems revolutionizing digital experiences can also manage education, medicine, legal analysis—entire industries traditionally thought untouchable.

And let’s be honest: the tech companies selling this future are lying to you. They’re framing AI as just another industrial revolution, but it’s not. This isn’t the light bulb or the telephone. This is modular, scalable, and non-human. It doesn’t create jobs—it eliminates them.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I’m not a doomsayer. I’m an AI engineer working in the trenches, getting paid well to ride this wave while it lasts. But I see where this is headed. I’ve told friends and family to pivot their careers toward places AI won’t reach—fields requiring physical presence or deep human intuition. The reality is, that even those of us working in AI know our work is temporary.

Governments aren’t prepared for this level of job displacement. Will we see public service programs collapse? Will this push political movements like Trumpism further, as people fight over shrinking opportunities? It’s hard to say, but the consequences will be seismic.

I don’t have the answers, but I do know this: listen to the engineers, not the CEOs. Get on Reddit, get on the ground floor of this conversation. The people building these systems will tell you the truth. The corporations? They’ll sell you a pipe dream of progress. And it certainly can be progress, as long their can be a graceful transition and a cultural shift away from valuing a person only if they have a job.

Related Blog Post: https://jaredlukes.com/the-overlooked-reality-of-ai-and-job-displacement