Interview “I think everybody is adopting AI irresponsibly and I think it’s going to have a net negative outcome on the socio-economic standing of the world,” said Bars Juhasz. “So let’s see if we can’t pitch more of a win-win future.”
Juhasz, CEO of no-code automation biz WorkBeaver, told The Register in an interview that he hopes to encourage the adoption of AI-based automation – agents – from the demand side rather than the supply side, from the perspective of the office worker rather than management.
Around August 2024, he said, he sold most of his shares in Undetectable.ai, a company he co-founded, and found himself in a position to work on whatever he wanted.
Given his background in machine learning, he said, he started thinking about AI agents – AI models given access to tools – and how they’re likely to affect society. The result was WorkBeaver.
“We think companies are going to rush in, they’re going to adopt AI too quickly, lay off people as a result of that, realize they messed up, and have to bring people back in,” said Juhasz. “And wouldn’t you know it? Here we are a year later, and it’s played out almost to the T of how we hoped they wouldn’t go, but here we are.”
Juhasz expects that within five to ten years workers will have to demonstrate some level of AI proficiency appropriate to their roles, a view evident in Purdue University’s new AI competency requirement as a condition of graduation. But, he said, “a lot of people are just not going to be able to do that. They’re just not in that position.” Maybe they’re non-technical, he said, or they’re just resisting the technology.
Taking it slowly may be anathema in an industry that celebrates the Zuckerbergian zeal to “move fast and break things.” However, the consequence of urgent AI adoption imperatives is that someone has to deal with the mess.
“Now we’ve got these stories coming out of having to backtrack, of AI janitors, right?” Juhasz mused. “A whole new career dedicated just to cleaning up messes left by this rush.”
WorkBeaver, said Juhasz, represents an attempt to help people become comfortable with AI, regardless of their level of technical competency.
“So instead of focusing on the business side of the equation, the supply side, what if we focused on the demand side?” he said. “What if we focused on the people who are set to be displaced, who otherwise realistically have very little fighting chance to be in the competitive workforce in the next five to ten years?”
WorkBeaver presently functions by using a menu-driven interface that asks users for prompt-based descriptions of tasks. The underlying AI agent then attempts to carry out the described task as if it were the human user, without requiring code or APIs.
The company website contains a variety of use cases designed to help people understand the sorts of tasks its tech can handle, because people don’t necessarily see how AI technology can help them accomplish things. Examples include automated form filling, reminder setting, appointment setting, email sending, data gathering, and data entry.
“Some of the people using WorkBeaver to create agentic automations don’t even use ChatGPT,” said Juhasz. “That’s the level of non-technical we’re targeting.”
Juhasz said WorkBeaver’s approach differs from other companies selling agentic tools through its focus on staff and what workers find helpful, rather than top-down directives to use AI without much understanding of the work being done.
“For example, I spoke with reporters at Reuters and they have top-down mandates from managers who are not editors, who are not journalists, coming in saying: ‘Okay, you guys have to use these tools X amount of times per week.’ To me, they’re KPIs [key performance indicators], right? And the tools they’re asking them to use are literally replacing the critical thinking process of the job. It’s like put in the story, put in the sources, and it’ll spin differently. Obviously, as you can imagine, they’re not too happy about it. They don’t believe that’s where automation should be taking place.”
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WorkBeaver launched its private alpha in January this year and reached open beta in September. The company now has close to 4,000 users, according to Juhasz, primarily among small-