Greg Isenberg forecasts AI agents within 12 months

The coming merger of AI agents with the physical world.

@iddris, founder/CEO of @openmatterco and I have a wide-ranging conversation about how the next platform shift may not be just AI chat, robotics, smart glasses, or autonomous cars separately. It may be the connective tissue between all of them.

This video teaches viewers that the next wave of AI agents will not just operate inside apps, browsers, calendars, and spreadsheets. The real frontier is agents that can understand, coordinate, and act in the physical world.

Iddris explains a vision for “agentic infrastructure for atoms”: systems that let AI agents manage physical objects, deliveries, storage, location, identity, logistics, robots, vehicles, and real-world context.

imagine prompting your agents indoors at the a16z new media retreat in napa

More AI agent observations below (I keep adding to the list):

1. Hermes agents write to their own memory after every task. Which means starting today versus starting in 6 months is an unfair advantage for you.

2. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now

3. The real reason local models matter for founders: you can ship a product where the AI runs entirely on the customer's device and you never touch their data. Zero privacy concerns. Zero server costs. Zero compliance headaches.

That changes which industries you can sell to overnight. Healthcare, legal, finance, all the regulated verticals that won't send data to the cloud just opened up.

4. Every company needs to be rebuilt as a "second brain" before agents can be useful. That means every process, every decision, every piece of institutional knowledge has to exist in a format an agent can read. Most companies have none of this.

5. Agent costs are the new headcount. Won't be crazy for companies to spend 50%+ of their total headcount cost on tokens.

6. Agents are accidentally creating internal competition at companies. The marketing agent and the sales agent are optimizing for different metrics and working against each other without anyone realizing it. It took humans decades to develop cross-functional alignment. Nobody thought about it for agents.

7. The YAML config file is becoming the new org chart. Who reports to who, what permissions they have, what tools they access, all defined in a config file. The company's structure is literally a file you can version control, fork, and deploy. That's new.

8. The first agents that can smell a scam are going to be worth billions. Right now agents will happily wire money to a fake invoice because it matched the format. The trust layer is completely missing.

9. We're about to find out that most "expertise" was actually just memory. Knowing the tax code. Knowing the case law. Knowing which supplier charges what. When an agent holds all of that in context, the expert's value shifts from "I know things" to "I know which things matter." Much smaller group of people.

10. We're all running the same models. The differentiation is in what you feed them. Two founders with the same agent, same model, same tools will get wildly different results based purely on the quality of their knowledge base. Garbage context in, garbage output out. Forever.

11. The most underbuilt category in AI right now: agents for old people. 70 million boomers who need help with medical forms, insurance claims, and appointment scheduling.

12. Agent latency is the new page load speed. If your agent takes 45 seconds to respond, your customer already switched to one that takes

13. Skills files are the new apps. A SKILL.md that tells an agent how to do one thing well is more valuable than a SaaS subscription that does the same thing behind a login screen.

14. AI hardware... how do you create devices that are good businesses that people want? It'll be a $30 dongle you plug into existing dumb devices to give them an agent brain. Smart toaster doesn't need to be built from scratch. It needs a $30 brain attached to a $15 toaster.

15. Your agent can read faster than you can think. The bottleneck in every agent workflow is now the human approval step. We're the slow part. That's a strange thing to sit with.

16. Agents made the 80/20 rule violent. The 20% of work that matters is now the only work humans do. The 80% just disappeared. Entire job descriptions were hiding inside that 80%.

17. The thing I keep coming back to: the best businesses right now are being built by people who are just slightly ahead of their customers. Not 10 years ahead. 6 months ahead. That's the sweet spot. Far enough to lead. Close enough to be understood.