I went to a friend's house recently. He had set up a little workspace in a corner of his home. A Mac Mini, a laptop, two screens, everything organised with real intention. He was monitoring something. Running something. Adjusting things with the kind of quiet focus that takes time to develop.
I was blown away.
This is not a person who came from technology. He never worked in IT. Never studied computer science. His career has been in procurement and supply chain, in the operational infrastructure of organisations. The kind of work that keeps things running but rarely gets called visionary.
A few weeks earlier, I had made my pitch to him. The same pitch I make to everyone these days. Get in. Try it. Build something small. See what happens.
I convert about one in ten. He was the one.
Within three weeks, he had built himself what he calls his Jarvis. A personal agentic system, running on his home setup, built with Claude Code and a handful of other tools. We live in the desert, so he is using it to monitor his centralised water heater and water filtration, to run the lighting and mood across his house. He is using it to help write a book. And he is applying the same capability at work, building supply chain models in a domain where he has spent his career understanding how things connect and where they break. One system, three completely different surfaces of his life.
He had come at it methodically, the way he approaches everything, but with the curiosity of someone who had genuinely caught the bug.
What struck me most was not the technical achievement. It was what I could not explain.
I do not know exactly what it is about him that made this click so fast. His organisational instincts, almost certainly. His comfort with systems and processes. His ability to think about how things connect. Skills he had spent a career developing in contexts that never had a technical outlet. But whatever the combination, it was already there. The new tools did not create it. They revealed it.
Within a short time, his management started noticing. Who is this person? What department are you actually in? How do we get you doing more of this?
That is what I think is going to happen everywhere. And it is one of the most exciting and underappreciated things about this moment.
We have spent decades building organisations around a narrow definition of what technical capability looks like. It looks like a degree. It looks like a job title. It looks like years of experience in a specific function. Everyone who did not fit that profile, regardless of how they actually thought, stayed on the other side of that line.
There is a version of every organisation where real talent is sitting quietly in procurement, in operations, in admin, in customer support. People who think systematically. People who have spent years figuring out how things connect and where they break. People who never had a mechanism to express that capability in a way the organisation could see.
Agents are that mechanism.
The barrier was not intelligence. It was activation energy. The technical bottleneck required skills that had to be learned separately, often expensively, often over years.
That bottleneck is collapsing. Not gone, but low enough now that someone with the right instincts and three weeks of genuine effort can build something real.
And when they do, something tends to change in them that does not go back. I have yet to see someone genuinely build with these tools and come away unchanged. Their fluency shifts. The way they see problems shifts. They stop seeing their work as something they operate inside and start seeing it as something they can reshape.
I think about it this way. The gyroscope was invented in the early 1800s. For most of its early existence it was a curiosity, a demonstration piece, something professors used to illustrate principles of physics to students. The underlying principle worked perfectly. But the world had no context in which its true value could be expressed.
Then aviation arrived. Then space travel. Then smartphones. The principle that sat in a lecture hall cabinet became the invisible foundation of flight stability, of navigation, of the screen rotating in your hand right now. The device evolved enormously across that journey, but the core idea did not need to change. The world grew into it.
That is what I think is happening to people right now.
The capability was already there, working perfectly. The procurement professional with extraordinary systems thinking. The administrator with genuine engineering instincts. The operations manager who understands how things connect in ways that are often invisible from a purely technical function. They were not waiting to be developed. They were waiting for a world that had instruments which needed what they had.
Agentic AI is that instrument. And when it meets the right person, what comes out is not predictable. But it tends to be real.
Here is the problem I do not think we are taking seriously enough.
This fluency is not being taught consistently, at scale, in schools, universities, or most workplaces yet. Even if it were introduced tomorrow, it would be a decade before those students entered the workforce. There is some hope in the most agile institutions, the ones moving fast enough to stay ahead of what the tools can actually do. But for most organisations, the pipeline they are used to relying on will not arrive fast enough on its own.
Which means businesses have to close that gap themselves.
I am not arguing against governance. Governance is necessary. Security, data handling, risk, audit trails, the structures that let serious organisations operate at scale, all of that has to hold. What I am arguing against is over-governing the discovery phase. The phase where you do not yet know what you need to build, what is actually possible, or which of your people have the instincts to find out. That phase needs space.
Closer to how a school or university actually works. Education for the sake of learning. Pushing people to build individually, on their own terms, following their own curiosity. Inside a sandbox with approved tools, clear data boundaries, and the freedom to build badly before they build well. Not measuring the outcome against a business case, because the honest answer to what we will need from an AI-capable workforce tomorrow is that we do not fully know yet. What we do know is that the organisations with the most people who have genuinely built things will be the ones best positioned to respond to whatever comes next.
The investment is not in a system. It is in a person. And as my friend demonstrated, three weeks is enough to reveal a capability the organisation had never seen.
My conversion rate is one in ten. I am working on it.
The people who do cross over rarely go back to seeing their work the same way. Not because the tools are magic. Because the tools finally gave them a way to show what was already there.
Your organisation is full of people like my friend. Give them approved tools, clear boundaries, a sandbox, and permission to build something imperfect.
Then ask yourself whether you are going to give them the three weeks to find out.