Something happened in January, something that i was expecting but certainly wasn't prepared for. I though i was a good 6-12 months away from being able to use agents to support with BAU business task.
I knew this was going to happen sooner or later, we all knew it was going to happen, but most of the experiments i ran in 2025, using ChatGPT, Claude for conversation and asset creation, using Make.com and Microsoft Copilot for work flow automation produced less than stellar results. They showed promise but that promise seemed a long way off. Hype cycle versus reality.
This is no longer true, not by a long shot.
On the 25th November 2025 Anthropic released Opus 4.5 a 'reasoning model' which is able to use tools and 'planning' mode to complete task for you. Developers were the first to notice the productivity boost and they did what developers always do pushed the boundaries and started to use it for more than just dev tasks. They used it organise their file system, connect to browsers to test website they're building (not creating UI automation script, using your browers on your machine to take actions). Anthropic took note and on the 12th Jan after only 10 days of dev work with Claude code they built and released Claude Cowork. A research project that uses Claude code as a general purpose agent to do non technical work.
I started using it in anger shortly after and what i've done with it is nothing short of amazing, exciting and slighlty terrifying.
What have i done with Claude Code/Cowork that i couldn't do before?
- I created a skill that will automatically brand any document into the UXC brand
- I've created a command that will read the files in my 'Meetings to action' file on my computer to summarise the meetings, put the summary in my project folders and draft a follow up email to the participants
- I'm able to clients quotes using my estimates sheet, and product service offering data to create brand new presentations, branded and ready to send out.
- I have created fully working prototype from Figma, and collaborative development to enhance, validate and deploy to a website for my clients to interact with.
- I created a UX researcher agent that will try to complete a task on a specified website (using my local browesr) and let our experts user researcher focus on the areas that require most attention rather than doing broad unfocused expert reviews.
My team have been busy too they've been using to create passion projects that didn't have the time for, or capability to delivery without the support of our engineering team.
The blockers to experimentation and discovery are gone, I can spin up projects and assets at the speed of thought. All those ideas i had but couldn't action are now within my reach.
I l believe the promise that a new wave of entrepreneurship is at our fingertips, bringing with it new opportunities for wealth generation.
Stepping back and assessing this new reality
In May last year I wrote Do you fit into the delivery team do the future at the time I envisaged that would be a few years away. I was wrong. It's now.
My vision is that domain experts would work with AI Engineers to frame the problem space, define the architecture and get AI Agents to so the heavy lifting.
This vision is still true, AI and Agents are great, but the still need people with domain expertise to give them the right context to ensure what's being built is desirable, secure and aligned to business and customer needs.
You only have to look at the graveyard that is the great vibe coding experiments of 2025 to see this is true.
In the hand of inexperienced practitioners you risk producing slop, but the hands of experts you create something magical.
We've seen this before, we saw it in the dotcom boom, in the professionalisation of the digital industries.
Are you heeding the call?
Now's the time to act, to learn and to embrace this new way of working.
There are two waves of transformation that are happening right now and only a small part of that is focused on technology.
As BCG says, AI transformation is 10% Tech, 20% Process and 70% People focused.
There four levels of AI adoption:
- The Bystanders
- The Conversationalist (Consultant and Collaborator)
- The Automator
- The Orchestrator
Transformation 1. Moving from Bystander to a collaborative conversationalist, this is about personal productivity gains and will be mandatory for all future work engagements.
Transformation 2. Moving from Conversationalist to Orchestrator, this is about creating organisational efficiencies and systematically integrating AI into our core business processes.
This transformation requires domain experts and AI engineers to work together to identify, and implement new, ai enabled workflow to unlock capacity and drive new business growth.
This is the scary next step, this is where the trust deficit rears its ugly face, where the spector of AI related layoffs looms large.
There has been too much investment in this new era of AI for this to simply go away, transformation is not an option it's mandatory, just as the digital transformation of the past 30 were.
Are you ready to take this seriously and start the transformation require to compete, not in five years or ten years, but now?
AI/Agents are now ready to go work, the companies that embrace this transformation will be the companies that thrive in the next era of work.
