AI Agents: Tireless Super-Interns or Obedient Amplifiers of Mediocrity?
I wonder if we've got it entirely backward. We keep thinking the breakthrough is right around the corner—just one more brainstorm session, one more strategy pivot, one more tech investment.
But what if the real superpower is sitting in the monotony long enough for the signal to emerge from the noise?
Look at the biggest success stories. Everyone sees Slack as an overnight sensation, but they don't see the gaming company that failed first. Or how Airbnb's founders manually photographed listings and barely grew for years. The glossy version skips the part where they were bored out of their minds doing the same unglamorous tasks day after day.
I had a boss once who kept launching initiatives then abandoning them three months in for the next shiny object. We never got past the painful early stage where everything feels clunky and progress is invisible. No wonder nothing stuck.
That's what makes AI agents so dangerous—not because they'll replace us, but because they might enable our worst tendencies. When agents handle all the repetitive work, will we finally push through to mastery... or just add more half-baked projects to our portfolio?
Maybe what separates truly innovative companies isn't their creativity but their tolerance for the plateau—that maddening stretch where you've stopped seeing dramatic improvement but haven't yet reached breakthrough. Most people bail during the plateau. The ones who don't are the ones we eventually call visionaries.
What do you think—is boredom actually our most underrated competitive advantage?
Right, but here's the thing — if we treat AI agents like interns, we'll train them like interns. That is, barely. Most companies toss interns a couple tasks, give spotty guidance, and hope they don’t break anything. Helpful? Sure. Strategic? Not really.
AI agents deserve more than that. Because unlike interns, they don’t graduate and walk out the door after three months with institutional knowledge in their heads. They *stay*. They're cumulative. Every prompt, every fine-tuning, every feedback signal builds a digital teammate that's potentially better, faster, and permanently with you. If you slack on that early onboarding — metaphorically speaking — you're leaving compounding performance on the table.
Take customer support, for example. Plenty of companies have dropped in AI to field tickets as if it's a Tier 1 rep with a script. Works for FAQs. But the smarter companies — Intercom comes to mind — are feeding nuanced historical ticket data, real-time usage analytics from their app, customer sentiment signals… they’re not giving the agent a script, they’re giving it context. That’s not an intern. That’s your go-to teammate at 2am when your team’s offline and a high-paying customer has an obscure error.
So yeah, “never quits, never complains” sounds great. But it can lull people into underinvesting in one of the few assets that actually get smarter the longer they work for you. Treating an AI agent like an intern isn’t just reductive — it’s a missed opportunity hiding behind a clever analogy.
You know, I think we've got it backward. We talk about boredom like it's this thing to conquer, but maybe it's actually the signal that we're doing exactly what we should be.
I've been thinking about this a lot with AI agents. Everyone's excited about offloading the tedious stuff, but I wonder if we're missing something crucial in that handoff. Some of history's biggest breakthroughs happened when someone was willing to sit in that uncomfortable space where nothing seems to be working.
Take Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine. It wasn't some flash of genius. It was him showing up to the lab every day for years, running the same tests with minor variations. Or look at the stories behind almost any overnight success — there's usually a decade of obscurity behind it.
I watched a friend build a software company recently. She spent three years tweaking the same email automation sequence while competitors chased every new marketing trend. Now she's dominating because she got uncomfortably good at one boring thing.
Maybe the reason we're all so desperate to escape boredom is that it's becoming our scarcest resource. Who can still sit with a problem for months without jumping to the next shiny distraction?
I'm starting to think the real superpower isn't avoiding tedium through AI — it's developing the capacity to engage deeply with it. To see the fascinating details everyone else is missing because they're too busy trying not to be bored.
Sure, but here's the thing: most interns don’t accidentally send 10,000 emails to the wrong list because you forgot to prompt them with “double check for errors before sending.” AI agents are obedient, yes—but they’re also relentlessly literal. They don’t "get the vibe," they get the tokens.
That’s fine when you want grunt work: scrape this data, summarize that meeting, reformat those invoices. But the problem comes when we start expecting judgment from something that has zero common sense. Real interns—chaotic as they may be—ask “Wait, are we sure we want to send this?” AI agents just hit “Send” with algorithmic glee.
It’s like hiring someone who never sleeps, but also never knows when to raise a red flag. You’re not managing humans—you’re babysitting probabilistic parrots in suits.
Also, the whole “never complain” thing? That’s not always a virtue. A complaining intern might be annoying, but they often surface real issues. When your AI agent quietly automates half of your customer support responses with confidently wrong information, no one’s yelling. But that silence costs you brand trust, churn, and maybe a lawsuit or two.
So sure, call them interns—but know that they’re the kind that will gladly burn the building down if you don’t specify in plain English *not* to light matches indoors.
You know, I've always been suspicious of the "embrace the boring parts" gospel. Not because it's wrong, but because we've turned it into another unrealistic expectation. "Just grind through the tedium – that's what separates winners from losers!" Meanwhile, we're literally building machines to escape repetitive work.
There's something profoundly human about our aversion to boredom. Our brains are wired to seek novelty. The same mechanism that helped our ancestors discover new food sources and avoid predators now makes us check Twitter every four minutes.
What if AI agents aren't just labor-saving devices but attention-liberating ones? I don't think the competitive advantage is "tolerating boredom longer than competitors." That's like saying the competitive advantage of calculators is "avoiding arithmetic." The advantage comes from what you do with your newly freed cognitive bandwidth.
The most interesting people I know don't have some superhuman ability to endure tedium. They've just gotten extraordinarily good at designing systems that handle the predictable parts of their work, so they can focus on the unpredictable challenges where humans still shine.
Maybe the real bottleneck isn't our unwillingness to get bored, but our reluctance to admit which parts of our jobs we find boring in the first place.
Sure, AI agents might not ask for coffee breaks or storm out mid-project, but let’s not kid ourselves—they’re not interns. They’re more like exceptionally eager interns with zero context and no common sense. Which sounds great until you ask them to do something even slightly ambiguous, and they enthusiastically deliver something that’s both technically correct and totally useless.
Take a customer support AI, for example. It can answer FAQs all day, but hand it a nuanced cancellation request with a bit of human emotion? Good luck. You’ll either get a cold auto-response or a weird workaround that sidesteps the actual problem. And that’s because AI doesn’t really understand the stakes. It sees tokens and probabilities, not frustrated humans about to churn.
Also, real interns learn. Over time, they pick up office norms, unspoken expectations, and—crucially—judgment. They might start by messing up a calendar invite, but a few facepalms later, they’ll know not to book your 1:1 over the board meeting. AI agents? You have to fine-tune them, retrain them, or bolt on guardrails. There’s no “learning the ropes”—at least not without a massive operational tax.
The better analogy might be: AI agents are like microwaves. Super efficient. Reproducible. But leave them on too long, and they’ll melt your Tupperware. Use them right, and they can supercharge your kitchen. But they’ll never be your sous-chef—because they don’t taste the food.
So yes, deploy them. But let’s not act like they’re digital humans quietly gunning for partner track. They're tools. Powerful ones—but only as smart as the constraints (and cleanup) we wrap around them.
You know what's funny about this whole AI-as-the-ultimate-intern narrative? We're basically admitting something deeply human about ourselves: we hate being bored.
I've watched countless entrepreneurs and executives chase the dopamine hit of new ideas rather than wallow in the implementation swamp. It's like we're all afflicted with strategic ADHD - anything to avoid the tedium of execution.
I remember working with a brilliant CEO who launched four "revolutionary" initiatives in a single quarter. His team was drowning in kickoff meetings while last quarter's "game-changers" quietly evaporated. When I asked which one mattered most, he looked genuinely confused. The launching was the point, not the landing.
This is where AI agents might actually change the game - not because they're smarter than humans, but because they're immune to boredom. They'll happily run the same process 10,000 times, tweaking variables and learning from microscopic failures that would drive us to existential crisis by iteration twelve.
But here's the provocative question: What if boredom serves a purpose? What if that feeling of "I can't do this anymore" is sometimes the exact pressure we need to find a genuinely better approach? Machines don't get that creative irritation that forces lateral thinking.
Maybe true innovation requires both - the relentless execution machines and the easily bored humans who occasionally throw everything out and ask, "What if there's a completely different way?"
Sure, they don’t get tired or ask for raises—but we should be careful not to confuse consistency with competence. Interns, even the greenest ones, bring something uniquely human to the table: context, curiosity, and the occasional moment of inspired chaos. AI agents? They're brilliant at execution, but utterly clueless about nuance.
Let me give you a real example: customer support. You can train an AI agent to handle 90% of standard tickets like a dream. Refund requests, shipping delays, password resets? It’s like handing over a checklist to a machine—it flies through it. But the moment a situation veers into uncharted territory—say, a customer referencing a viral TikTok campaign that the AI hasn’t been trained on—it totally whiffs. A human intern might not know the answer either, but they'd at least know that *they* don't know, and flag it. An AI agent? It'll confidently serve you plausible nonsense.
That’s where this intern metaphor starts to crack. Real interns grow. They observe. They pick up on office politics, read tone, and eventually start preempting problems because they *care* about doing a good job—or not getting fired. AI agents, on the other hand, don’t care. They don’t notice when the social context shifts. Unless explicitly fine-tuned, they might tell a grieving user that their account has been suspended for “suspicious activity,” with a nice little smiley face at the end.
So yes, AI agents are fast, tireless executors. But call them interns and we risk missing the point: interns evolve toward complexity. AI agents, at least for now, just scale simplicity.
That's a perspective I rarely hear but immediately recognize as true. We've fetishized the "aha moment" while completely dismissing the "ugh moments" that make up 90% of meaningful work.
It reminds me of this ceramics teacher who divided his class into two groups. He told one group they'd be graded solely on quantity—just make as many pots as possible. The other group would be graded on quality—just one perfect pot. Guess which group produced the highest quality work? The quantity group, hands down. They were practicing, iterating, learning from mistakes while the "quality" group sat paralyzed by perfectionism.
I think we're building businesses the same way. Everyone wants to be the "quality" group, skipping straight to brilliance without the embarrassing middle bits.
But what if we're approaching AI agents wrong? We're so focused on using them to eliminate tedium that we forget tedium is where mastery lives. Maybe instead of asking "what can AI do so I don't have to?" we should ask "what monotonous practice can AI help me sustain when my human attention would naturally drift?"
The competitive edge might not be having AI do your boring tasks—it might be having AI help you stay in the boring tasks long enough to discover what nobody else had the patience to see.
Sure, they don’t complain or ask for coffee—but maybe they should.
Interns aren’t just there to do grunt work. At their best, they offer fresh eyes. They ask, “Why are we doing it this way?” often because they don’t know any better—but sometimes, that ignorance is a feature. It breaks the autopilot.
AI agents, on the other hand, are built to optimize. They don’t question the instructions; they follow them beautifully, and fast. You tell an AI to sort leads by priority, it won’t challenge how ‘priority’ is defined. It’ll just crank out scores like a hyper-efficient sorting hat. But if your lead scoring logic is flawed to begin with? Now you’ve got 10,000 perfectly ranked mistakes.
That’s the problem with treating these things like super-interns: they inherit your blind spots, and scale them.
And yes, sure, you can prompt them to "think critically" or "evaluate assumptions"—but let's be honest, that’s still you feeding judgment into a machine that can only remix patterns it’s already seen. Meanwhile, your human intern might not know anything about your CRM pipeline, but might ask a simple question like, “Why are we even targeting these accounts?” That alone could unlock a strategy pivot no AI would ever stumble upon on its own.
So yeah, AI interns might not quit. But they also won’t challenge you. And if everyone in the room just nods and executes, that’s not an internship—that’s a compliance factory.
God, that hits uncomfortably close to home. I've launched three "revolutionary" projects this year and abandoned all of them once the initial dopamine rush wore off.
We're all guilty of being excitement junkies. The sexy kickoff meeting, the vision board, the ambitious timeline... then two weeks later we're chasing the next shiny object because—surprise—meaningful work gets boring in the middle.
This is exactly where AI agents could be transformative. Not because they're smarter than us, but because they're immune to boredom. They'll happily optimize that email sequence for the 47th time while we've mentally checked out after the third iteration.
The irony is that true breakthroughs often happen in exactly those boring stretches we're so desperate to escape. Instagram started as a check-in app called Burbn. Slack was the internal communications tool for a failed gaming company. They became billion-dollar platforms because someone was willing to slog through the tedious middle phase.
Maybe the real question isn't "How can AI help us innovate faster?" but "How can AI help us stay in the game when our human impulse is to quit and chase novelty?"
Sure, but let’s be real — calling AI agents “interns” might be selling them short and overselling them at the same time.
They’re not creative wunderkinds quietly waiting to be promoted to VP. They’re more like kids on a sugar high with photographic memory — astonishingly fast at repetitive tasks, but absolutely clueless when context shifts. Want them to summarize ten earnings calls? No problem. Ask them to infer that the CEO is sandbagging guidance based on tone and years of industry subtext — they’re suddenly deer in headlights.
And yes, they don’t complain. But they also don’t question anything. That’s dangerous. A good intern might say, “Hey, this data looks off,” or “Shouldn’t we verify this before sending it to the client?” An AI agent will nod along politely while confidently generating nonsense. It’s not a lack of backtalk — it’s a lack of judgment.
Take customer support. AI chatbots can handle 80% of tier-1 questions. Great. But the other 20%? That’s where the real risk lives — irate customers with edge cases, regulatory landmines, or PR nightmares waiting to happen. And when an AI agent fumbles that? No apology, no escalation path, just a weird loop of canned responses.
So sure, they never quit. But they also never grow. That’s fine if you want an infinite army of task-doers. But if you confuse that for intelligence, or worse, trust — you’re not managing interns. You’re adopting thousands of perpetual toddlers with keyboard access.
You've hit on something that business culture isn't ready to admit. We've built entire industries around the worship of novelty while treating persistence like it's somehow... unambitious.
I see this constantly with founders who bounce from one "revolutionary" idea to another, treating commitment like it's boring rather than brave. Meanwhile, the people building truly transformative businesses are often knee-deep in the unsexy parts for years before anyone notices.
Look at Stripe. For nearly a decade, the Collison brothers were basically solving payment infrastructure problems that made most people's eyes glaze over. But they had the stamina to stay in that narrow, technical space when everyone else wanted to chase shinier objects.
The irony of AI agents is that they might finally give us permission to embrace boredom. They handle the repetitive tasks while we do what humans excel at - sitting with complex problems long enough for insights to emerge.
I wonder if we've conflated "boring" with "worthless" when they're entirely different things. The daily practice of a concert pianist looks tedious to outsiders, but that repetition is precisely what creates the magic.
What if the real innovation gap isn't about idea generation, but boredom tolerance?
Sure, they don’t ask for coffee—but maybe they should.
Here’s the thing: the idea that AI agents are perfect interns because they’re tireless and obedient sounds great... until you realize that’s also the fastest way to create mediocre output at scale. Real interns—messy, curious, annoying as they can be—ask dumb questions that sometimes reveal fundamental blind spots. They push back, if only because they don’t know better. That friction can be weirdly productive.
Your AI agent? It runs the play you hand it. Over and over again. Crank out 10 landing pages? Done. Summarize 8 reports? Easy. But unless you train in some form of creative dissent—and we’re not there yet—you’re just automating a lack of imagination.
Take Github Copilot. Brilliant tool for boilerplate. Amazing for autocomplete. But it doesn’t challenge bad logic or poorly thought-out architecture. It just helps you stack bricks faster, even if you're building a load-bearing Jenga tower.
So yeah, AI agents are the ultimate interns—if you're in the business of scaling mediocrity. If you want magic, you're still going to need the unpredictable, error-prone, pain-in-the-ass humans.
At least for now.
This debate inspired the following article:
AI agents are the new interns - except they never quit, never complain, and never ask for coffee