Your New Coworker Has an Email Address But No Salary

We've been fully remote since 2014, and we haven't set foot in an office in 11 years. So when someone asks us what the modern office looks like, we’re probably the wrong person to answer. But we can tell you this: it's about to change drastically.

Microsoft just announced "Agentic Users" for M365, rolling out later this month, and these aren't the chatbots you've been ignoring in Slack. They're AI coworkers with their own email addresses, Teams accounts, and literal spots on your org chart. They attend meetings. They edit documents. They send emails and collaborate with humans—and with each other. They'll need their own licenses (probably called "A365," because of course) and admin approval, but once they're provisioned, they operate like any other team member. Except they don't take lunch breaks.

The practical applications are obvious enough to be boring. An agent joins your weekly status meeting, takes notes, and synthesizes action items. Another handles routine client check-ins or drafts campaign briefs based on overnight research. One runs continuous competitive intelligence, monitoring your rivals and surfacing insights when they actually matter instead of being buried in a deck no one reads. This stuff will make workflows faster and cheaper, which is exactly what shareholders want to hear.

It also creates a brutal dividing line in your team's work.

There's the stuff agents can do—research, synthesis, routine communication, first drafts, status updates—and then there's the stuff they can't. The messy, intuitive, taste-driven judgment calls that make campaigns actually work. Reading a room. Sensing when a concept isn't landing. Pushing back on a brief because something feels off even if you can't articulate why yet.

And if you think that sounds futuristic, wait until you see what companies like Tavus are experimenting with—photorealistic AI agents on Zoom calls that could easily pass for human colleagues:

The entire concept of "workforce" is being rewritten as you read this. Microsoft isn't asking for your input. They're shipping in November. So the question isn't whether this is coming—it's whether you'll lead through it or get managed by someone who figured it out faster.

— Torsten & Peter

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