--- title: "Vision" canonical: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/20/vision" publication: "TinyFish" publisher: "TinyFish" language: "en-US" guide: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt" permalink: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/20/vision" issue: 20 section: "vision" description: "Where human-AI collaboration is heading" authors: ["Nora Kaplan","Rina Takahashi"] published: 2026-03-16 updated: 2026-03-12 articles: 10 --- # TinyFish > CURRENT is a journal about AI agents in production, for the engineering and product leaders who have to make them work. Drawing on experience building enterprise web agents, it explains why the demo succeeded and the deployment didn't, and what that means for choosing vendors, briefing the board, and avoiding mistakes others have already made. [Read on the website]() ## Issue 20 — Vision Where human-AI collaboration is heading ### The Boring Inflection - [The Fastest Boring in Tech History]() — By [Nora Kaplan]() · Published 2026-03-11 · Format: The Boring Inflection Cloud computing took about twelve years to go from strategic initiative to forgettable line item. That long middle — unglamorous, mostly invisible — was where organizations actually figured out what the technology changed about their work. It wasn't dead time. It was the time that mattered most. ### Two Consequences - [The Feature, Not the Product]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2026-03-11 · Format: Two Consequences In 2010, SAP paid $5.8 billion for a database company. Four years later, the name was gone. The technology worked fine. It got absorbed into a platform. Protocols are settling now, enterprise vendors are bundling agents into existing contracts, and the standalone agent is starting to look a lot like the standalone database circa 2003. When the product becomes a feature, where does durable value collect? - [The Maintenance Phase]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2026-03-11 · Format: Two Consequences If agents become features embedded in every platform, someone still has to keep them working. BCG found that 70% of successful AI investment goes to people and processes, not algorithms or technology. The top enterprise challenges are integration, data quality, change management. Organizational problems wearing technical clothing, all of them. What does it actually look like, week after week, to maintain an agent-augmented process that the business keeps outgrowing? ### Living With It - [A VP of Engineering on What Happens After You Ship Agents and Your Mom Shares the Blog Post]() — Published 2026-03-11 *Tomás Ferreira-Wax is VP of Engineering at a Series D HR tech company with roughly 500 employees. The kind of company whose name you'd recognize if you've ever been onboarded at a mid-size firm and thought, "huh, this is smoother than expected." Six months ago, his team shipped agent capabilities into their core product: an AI system that orchestrates the dozens of small, tedious steps involved in bringing a new employee into an organization. Document collection, system provisioning, scheduling, compliance checks. The stuff that, when it breaks, a real human notices on their first day at a new job.* ### How Fast Boring Arrives - [The Boring Phase Is Arriving Faster Than Expected: Agent Infrastructure Hits Enterprise Velocity]() — Published 2026-03-11 Gartner projects 40% of enterprise applications will embed AI agents by the end of 2026, up from under 5% in 2025. An eightfold jump in one year. No previous enterprise technology cycle has compressed that fast. ### Further Reading - **AI Agents and Enterprise Transformation: Turning Hype into Measurable Value in 2026** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-11 The clearest case for why treating agents as feature additions, rather than operating model shifts, consistently fails. - **The New Boss at Work May Not Be Human** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-11 Ground-level reporting on agents assigning tasks to humans, not just assisting them — the hierarchy shift already underway. - **How Agentic AI Will Reshape Engineering Workflows in 2026** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-11 Documents the specific role shift from creator to curator; the engineering inflection is organizational, not technological. - **Enterprise Technology 2026: 15 AI, SaaS, Data, Business Trends to Watch** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-11 The source of the "merely a feature" reframe: the real prize is decision velocity, not agentic AI itself. - **The AI Risk That Few Organizations Are Governing** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-11 Agents are proliferating faster than identity and access governance can follow, per EY's global managing partner. ## Other sections in Issue 20 - [Daily Brief]() - [Market Pulse]() - [Foundations]() - [Practitioner's Corner]() - [Echoes]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()