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MTS · 3 min · Oct 20, 2026

Workers will shift from doing tasks to orchestrating agents

Marco Palladino predicts that people will design agentic loops while agents handle more operational work. He sees company events triggering automated workflows, with humans approving decisions when needed.

Marco Palladino

Marco Palladino is cofounder and CTO of Kong.

Co-founded Kong and launched Volcano, an AI-native platform for building and running production AI agents.

  • Theo Jaffee, Host · Co-founder & host, MTS

    One of the first members of a16z's new media team; earlier hosted the Emergent Ventures-backed Theo Jaffee Podcast.

  • Sophia Dew, Host · Host, MTS

About this segment

Marco Palladino predicts that people will design agentic loops while agents handle more operational work. He sees company events triggering automated workflows, with humans approving decisions when needed.

From “AI Agents Will Automate Entire Enterprise Orgs | Marco Palladino”, Oct 20, 2026. Watch the full episode

Answers “Which jobs will AI replace, and which are safe?” See all 18 answers

Answers “What will AI look like in the next few years?” See all 39 answers

“we're going to be the architects of agentic loops where the agents do the work for us”
Marco Palladinoat 20:21 · MTS20:21

Takeaways

  1. People will increasingly architect and orchestrate agent workflows.
  2. Events across the business can trigger agent processes.
  3. Keep humans in the loop where decisions need approval.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 4:49AI success shows up in outcomes, not token savings3:28
  2. 8:56Agents need infrastructure beyond a typical SaaS stack2:58

  3. 19:49Workers will shift from doing tasks to orchestrating agents2:49

  4. One more moment in the full episode
Up next · MTSCustomer demand convinced Daytona to pivot to agents3:09

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 19:54

    not just different providers that'll have to be stitched together. Super interesting. Marco, I wanted to get your perspective on... where you think this actually goes. I know we're in the early days of agents just getting adopted into enterprises, and I wanted to get your take on where you think we'll be in a year from now that isn't true today. I believe that in a year from now, we're going to be seeing more and more agentic loops being developed. You know, we're not going to be the ones doing the work anymore.

  2. 20:19

    We're not going to be the unit of, you know, compute anymore as humans, but we're going to be the architects of agentic loops where the agents do the work for us so our job is going to fundamentally shift from being the ones doing the work to being the ones orchestrating the work and then the agents do the work for us so there's going to be lots of multi-crew type of agentic capabilities being able to delegate tasks and sub tasks to specialized agents and so on and so forth and when you think about engineers and developers we are already doing that today you know many engineers, they used to write code late at night until 4 a.m., chasing a bug. Many of them today are just looking at the screen. And what are they looking at? They're looking at their agents doing the work for them. So they are already entering and wearing a different hat than they were even

  3. 21:08

    two or three years ago. That same change we have seen and witnessed with the developer teams, we're going to be witnessing in every other function in the organization. Legal, HR, IT, security, customer success, sales, we're going to be seeing a lot more agentic processes doing the work. And the people that were doing the work before are going to be architects. They're going to step back and have more of an architectural role. That is incredible because we can scale agents much quicker than we can scale humans. So we can truly do more. And I'm not saying that we're going to be fully replacing humans. Humans will change. The role will change. So we will specialize into being able to manage these large platforms that are running agents for us and doing the work for us. But the work itself, it is not going to be done by us anymore. It will be done

  4. 21:58

    by the agents. And so how do we operate in this framework? Well, everything has to be an event. Every new sale is an event. Every new customer onboarded is an event. Everything that we do in the organization is an event. And then we can create agents that can react to those events and start implementing automation left and right to do the work for us. Sometimes there's going to be a human in the loop having to approve or deny some type of operation.

  5. 22:22

    Some other times we'll feel comfortable having the agent autonomously making a decision. The point is we're going to be having a fundamental different organization if we look even at two years from now, three years from now, from where we are today. Yeah, we'll definitely look at it.