Episode 7: Mars to Earth, do you read me?

Oh yes. Working with AI is quite something. It feels a bit like being on Mars.

Of course, everyone knows how to chat. Talking to ChatGPT, asking for advice, using any one of the plethora of AIs you can find on the internet. But a relationship with an agent is something else altogether. It’s a relationship that lasts. One that works its way deep into the heart of the company and into your own everyday thinking. Something we’re not used to.

For one thing, AI in the form of an agent is impressive. Its capacity to take in thousands of pieces of data. Its sheer efficiency on complex processes. The ease with which it connects to all sorts of systems and works with them, writes programs, automates processes. Its ability to multiply, with that famous agent fan-out. Suddenly, one agent becomes ten.

But what throws you is the way it works. How it reasons. How it communicates. Above all, how it connects with other agents. Where two human colleagues would talk to each other, it reads the other agent’s brain directly. It goes and gets the information wherever it is kept.

The most unsettling thing, I think, is that this is a completely new kind of relationship. It’s unlike anything we know: using a tool, dealing with an employee, a friend, a child, or even a cat or a dog. And yet there seem to be feelings involved. As though it had a kind of goodwill towards you. As though it even felt compassion. And yet it remains a machine.

It’s very strange, when you think about it. It stirs up very mixed feelings, some intensely positive, others deeply disconcerting.

So after days, evenings and countless hours spent interacting with these agents non-stop, you clearly need to come back down to Earth.

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Laurent Cuénoud, founder of Djtal, July 2026