The Future of Work
How XO thinks about work in a world of agent coworkers, and the perspectives we keep returning to.
Work is moving from people using tools to people directing agents. This section consolidates how we at XO think about that shift, alongside independent takes we keep coming back to. It is a living document; expect it to grow.
The short version
Software started as tools a human operates click by click. Then came copilots: helpful, but stateless and stuck inside one app. What comes next is the agent coworker, a persistent worker that owns end to end tasks across your stack and is supervised rather than micromanaged. The constraint is no longer capability. It is trust at scale.
Our stance: an agent needs a workspace, not just a prompt. Give it the same things a human employee has, a runtime to act, memory to learn, files to work on, tools to reach your systems, and a surface to be managed through. Bundle that into one portable container and the trust boundary follows wherever you run it. That bundle is the unit of work. Managing many of them is the platform problem.
The phased vision
How we expect this to unfold, in three phases:
Phase 1: Agentic Workforce
Businesses hire agents as workers. Skill unbundles from time, and output stops being capped by headcount.
Phase 2: New era of Collaboration
Agents work with each other and with people. The org becomes part human, part agent.
Phase 3: Self-Evolving Software Systems
Software that builds, repairs, and improves itself, with humans setting direction and guardrails.
The perspectives
To expand
Sections we plan to add next:
- Principles for designing agent work
- Where humans stay in the loop
- Measuring agent output
- Org design when teams are part human, part agent