My Agents Don’t Want to Use Your Laptop
I’ve been meaning to write this for months. If you think I’m crazy, make a note and tell me at the end of 2028. I’m curious how this one will age...
Today, the most technical, highest-agency people I know are building agentic systems that genuinely let them do the work of a team. Not “AI-assisted productivity.” Full orchestration: agents that research, draft, schedule, build, review, and ship. One person doing what used to take forty or fifty.
Some of these people will stay solo. But some of them are going to want to work with other humans again. Join a company. Amplify their impact beyond what even a great agentic system can do alone. And with the impact of a team of 40, some companies are really going to want to hire them.
So let’s play this out.
The Offer
A technical former CMO has spent the last 18 months tuning their personal agentic org. They decide to take a job at a brand they’re passionate about for a few million a year. HR has a meltdown about pay bands, but the board is pressuring the CEO to turn around revenue, and this person’s track record is undeniable. The deal goes through.
Monday Morning
The new CMO’s agents send a brief to NewCo’s legal team. It proposes contractual language for limited use of and access to the CMO’s agentic system. The key terms:
Ownership and licensing. NewCo owns all deliverables outright. But the CMO’s agents retain a perpetual license to train on the generalized patterns of the engagement (methods, workflows, structural approaches) without retaining any direct record of proprietary company data or PII. Think of it like a consultant who gets smarter with every client but never shares your strategy deck.
The DMZ. A technical proposal for a shared context zone: a data environment where the CMO’s agents can access the company information they need to do their job (brand assets, performance data, customer segments, strategic docs) without that data ever touching the CMO’s personal infrastructure. Encrypted at rest, access-logged, with contractual and technical guarantees that the data stays in the zone and gets returned or destroyed at the end of the engagement.
Agent-to-agent interfaces. A proposal to stand up a joint working group to negotiate how the two agentic systems talk to each other. Authentication protocols for agent-to-agent communication. Agreed-upon message formats. Rate limits and circuit breakers so neither system can overwhelm the other. Permission scopes so the CMO’s analytics agent can query the data warehouse but can’t touch the billing system. This is the API design problem of the decade, and nobody has solved it yet.
Verification and audit. The CMO’s system commits to a continuous audit trail: what data was accessed, what was generated, what was sent where. Not because anyone’s being shady. Because when you have autonomous systems operating across organizational boundaries, “trust me” isn’t a compliance posture. The proposal includes provisions for third-party verification of the data handling commitments by a trusted agentic auditor.
Sub-processor commitments. The CMO’s agents use external services (LLM providers, search APIs, analytics platforms). Each one is a sub-processor under the agreement, with the same data handling obligations flowing down.
Insurance. Cyber liability, errors and omissions, probably some novel provisions for autonomous system failure modes that no underwriter has priced yet. The CMO’s proposal includes coverage terms because they’ve thought about this. They’ve had to.
Meanwhile
The IT person rocks up with a laptop and a sticky note with the temporary password to log into Office 365...
If this happens, IT infrastructure assumptions are about to get very weird, very fast.
This is not a today problem. And it assumes that the advantage individuals can create by staying on the bleeding edge continues to grow. If LLMs are a single S curve, this will probably never happen. Everyone else will catch up and we will all end up using whatever janky agentic system our employers hand to us.
But if this is just the start of a series of ever-steepening stacked S curves, and if the innovators on this curve get a durable advantage in climbing the next one and the ones after that (both possibilities, not axioms), this seems like one plausible implication of that trend.
I’m not going to ask how your company plans to handle the people who show up with capabilities that don’t fit in your org chart, your security model, or your onboarding checklist. At least not this year :)