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Agents of Tomorrow: Building the Next Generatio...

Agents of Tomorrow: Building the Next Generation of Intelligence

We stand at the edge of a profound shift in artificial intelligence. Over the last five years, generative AI has moved from novelty to necessity—transforming how we create, code, and collaborate. Now, a new frontier is emerging: AI agents. Unlike traditional tools that wait for instructions, agents can perceive, decide, and act toward goals—expanding the boundaries of what humans and machines can achieve together.

In this keynote, we’ll explore the evolution from copilots to fully agentic systems, highlight breakthroughs that are reshaping industries, and imagine the future horizons where autonomous agents redefine productivity, creativity, and discovery. Most importantly, we’ll discuss the role of humans in this new era—not as bystanders, but as leaders guiding how agents operate, align with our values, and amplify our potential.

The Agents of Tomorrow are here—and the future will be built by those bold enough to partner with them.

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Henk Boelman PRO

September 28, 2025

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  1. Agents of Tomorrow Henk Boelman Principal Cloud Advocate @ Microsoft

    Building the Next Generation of Intelligence
  2. Generative AI Goes Mainstream (2020–2022) The Copilot Paradigm (2021–2023) Explosion

    of Multimodality (2022–2024) Democratization & Ecosystem Growth (2022–2024) Emergence of AI Agents (2024–2025)
  3. Agent An AI agent is an autonomous software entity that

    perceives its environment, makes decisions, and takes actions to achieve specific goals, often using artificial intelligence techniques.
  4. What is an AI Agent? Retrieval Actions Memory LLM Instructions

    Tools Agent You are a friendly assistant called PizzaBot helping customers to place pizza orders. Input Output
  5. Human with assistant Every person has an AI assistant that

    helps them work better and faster Phase 1
  6. Human-led, agent-operated Phase 3 Humans set direction and agents run

    entire business processes and workflows, checking in as needed
  7. Enterprise Customer Support Human-led: The business sets strategy — e.g.,

    “Deliver 24/7 global support with consistent quality.” Agent-operated: AI agents handle the bulk of tickets — categorizing, resolving common issues, escalating edge cases. Humans check in only for exceptions, policy changes, or high-stakes cases.
  8. Finance & Operations Human-led: CFO sets business rules (spend thresholds,

    reporting cadence). Agent-operated: AI agents reconcile transactions, flag anomalies, prepare reports, and forecast cash flow. The CFO intervenes only when anomalies are escalated.
  9. Humans provide the vision and guardrails while agents execute the

    workflows and handle complexity and checking back only when needed.
  10. What is our responsibility? As a project manager? As an

    engineer? As a founder? As a developer?
  11. Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come

    down. That is not my department Wernher von Braun
  12. “The future we invent is a. choice we make, not.

    something that just happens” Satya Nadella