How to Raise Your Agent Episode 3 | Ryan Kurt, Founder & CEO, The AI Lab

Ryan Kurt recalls that over a decade ago, tools could already generate AP-style recaps of seven-year-old Little League games in real time, yet the leap to open-ended systems still felt distant until ChatGPT arrived and removed the previous ceilings on conversation length and depth.

From chat interfaces to autonomous agents

The conversation describes a rapid move beyond chatbots. Earlier systems required heavy scripting and hit hard limits on what they could handle. Newer agents operate across many steps without constant human prompts, which has shifted demand toward high-volume, high-value business uses rather than one-off queries. Kurt notes that knowledge work—analyzing information and advancing toward outcomes—now contains large segments that can be automated, creating both displacement and entirely new tasks. Companies seeing the fastest gains treat this as an expansion of roles rather than a head-count reduction; they ask what additional services customers might need and redesign around those possibilities instead of trimming existing processes.

Internal champions and insourcing