Today AI is mostly augmenting, rather than replacing, tasks. Humans are in-the-loop. But my sense is that, for many tasks, augmentation is a pit stop on a journey where full automation is the final destination. And as we chain these tasks together, humans begin to slip outside the loop: instead of steering it from within, they oversee it.
This means work is reorganised around several functions, and these do not necessarily sit with the same person: designing the chain (what agents, in what order, with what instructions and context), overseeing the implementation of the chain (and tweaking as needed), and judging the output (is this campaign any good? does it meet the client’s needs? would I stake my reputation on it?). The first two of these in particular are perhaps what the World Economic Forum and others mean by ‘agent orchestrators’