If you can’t trust your people, you won’t trust your agents – RTO mandates mean you’re not ready for AI

Over the last couple of years I have noticed a weird paradox.

On the one hand many enterprises are desperately pursuing the implementation of AI — and in particular dream of agents that are given broad scope to transform productivity. They yearn to give AI agency.

On other hand many of those same enterprises are forcing their employees to return to the office using the excuse of productivity… despite some large‑scale studies that suggest otherwise. They yearn to strip humans of agency.

Is it only me that sees that as weird?

No company is suggesting that they are going to set up desks and put embodied agents onto them — like a crazy enterprise version of the current fad for running OpenClaw agents on Mac Minis.

And so by definition agents will run anywhere and everywhere. They will run in the cloud. They will run on customer devices. They will run ...