All the major AI platforms are loudly pushing “AI automation studios” where rank-and-file knowledge workers can create sophisticated AI-powered workflows across their enterprise workspace environments. These tools are genuinely impressive, as workers can now use plain language to describe what they want and how it should work, while AI handles the triggering, filtering, and decision-making that previously required a programmer’s mindset to build.
These tools are awesome.
But they are NOT the AI-powered future of knowledge work I’ve been writing about.
The pitch behind automation studios (such as Microsoft Copilot Studio or Google Workspace Studio) goes something like this:
There are two problems with this:
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) was sold in part on the premise that workers could finally automate their own workflows without IT involvement. The tools got easier over time and the connectors multiplied. But after years of investment, most enterprises only have a handful of RPA specialists building bots while the vast majority of workers never touch the platform.
The same thing happened with low-code tools, citizen development platforms, and every other “democratize automation” initiative. The 1% of workers who think like programmers build amazing things. The other 99% keep doing their jobs the way they always have.
This isn’t a failure of the tools—they work as they should. Rather the failure comes from thinking knowledge workers will stop working to investigate, experiment, and try to learn those tools.
To be clear, “AI powered automations” will absolutely be a thing. But those automations won’t come from workers building workflows in studios. They’ll come workers interacting with AI, asking it to do things for them.
This is where AI as the interface becomes real. When AI platforms become the primary way workers interact with their digital environment, apps recede into the infrastructure. The automation piece will be part of that same shift.
Today’s AI automation studios are powerful, and I love that they exist. My argument isn’t that they’re not useful, rather I’m saying don’t look at these AI studios as “the future”—they’re really more of a stepping stone on the larger path towards true human-AI collaboration at work. They’re the “boring infrastructure” plumbing that AI labs need to put in place now so that future AI agents have all the connectors, access, and context they need to function.
At some point, AI will be good enough that everyone will experience its full potential without having to stop working to learn new tools. This will be similar to how the iPhone changed the world. It was so intuitive your grandparents could use it, while hiding the decades of technical magic that made it possible.
AI will get there too, and everyday workers won’t need to use automation studios.
As I mentioned a few times, I like the AI-powered automation studios, and for the workers who use them, they’re great. But they solve a narrow use case for a narrow segment of workers.
The longer term AI-powered vision is not to turn knowledge workers into automation designers. They’re managers, not programmers. They want to hand off tasks, not build systems. The future isn’t a million workers hunched over workflow designers—it’s workers interacting with AI as a coworker, in the same environment where they’ve always worked, using all the same tools, processes, and workflows they always have.
Read more & connect
Join the conversation and discuss this post on LinkedIn. You can find all my posts on my author page (or via RSS).
Brian Madden is a VP & futurist at Citrix. He writes about the future of work, AI in the workplace, and the evolution of Citrix.
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理，仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。
