Quantiphi CEO: Future Of AI Is ‘Superhuman’ Productivity

As soon as 2025, the industry will start to shift from offering AI assistants to providing full-fledged AI agents that can complete entire tasks on their own.

The tech industry is on track to begin offering GenAI-powered capabilities in 2025 that are more akin to a full-fledged agent than the types of assistants we are seeing today, according to the CEO of a major digital engineering company focused on AI projects.

Rather than AI turning us into “cyborgs,” the “more likely future is that each one of us will have a Jarvis-like assistant that will likely give us superhuman capabilities,” said Asif Hasan, co-founder and president of Quantiphi, referencing the famous “Iron Man” AI system. “If we do it right, that’s the kind of future that we can look forward to.”

Hasan spoke Monday at the 2024 XChange Best of Breed Conference, which is taking place in Atlanta and hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company. He noted that Marlborough, Mass.-based Quantiphi has completed 2,500 AI projects to date and nearly all of its revenue at this point is related to AI applications or AI readiness.

The next phase of advancement in GenAI is likely to start as soon as next year, Hasan said. “I believe 2025 is going to see what we call the rise of agents.”

While today many AI systems are already proficient at synthesizing information, the next step is for these systems to begin completing entire tasks for a user, such as booking an airline reservation, he said.

This will require AI systems to learn better reasoning abilities, including the ability to plan a task and break it down into smaller chunks. AI agents will also need to have the ability to browse the web, so those types of integrations will be crucial, according to Hasan.

Ultimately, however, “we feel 2025 will be the year we start to make a meaningful advancement in that direction,” he said.

Ahmed Mahmood, CEO of Ashburn, Va.-based solution provider Ocean Solutions, said there’s no question that the future will be around AI systems that can handle more complex tasks. In addition to the AI systems themselves, data systems will likely need to be “refined” so that it’s possible for the systems to interact more effectively with user commands, Mahmood said.

There may also be a potential for bringing together multiple AI systems to handle different parts of a task, he added.

“When you have a complex requirement, AI still can help you,” Mahmood said.

For Quantiphi itself, steps in this direction include developing a software engineering agent that can take project tasks and break them down into “very atomic units” before presenting them to developers, Hasan said.

As a result, “one individual can complete the entirety of one single task in one week, without having to talk to anyone,” he said, noting that this means developers don’t have downtime while waiting to be on-boarded to the next project. “The task is self-explanatory. They’re able to complete the task, check in the code and basically make productive use of that time.”