Three interviews this week on AI agents doing real work. Once the agent does the job, where does the person sit?
Three interviews this week on AI agents doing real work. Once the agent does the job, where does the person sit?
On CareTalk, Munjal Shah of Hippocratic AI talks about 1,700 patients a health system had lost to follow-up for lung cancer screening. Texts, emails and letters had failed. His agents called them. 252 scheduled, 180 showed up, and the scans found three cancers. Nobody had the staff to make those calls.
Jon Harmeling runs a Chick-fil-A in Miami Shores. One week his agent flagged a team member for overtime. The next week it surfaced the same shifts as a reason to thank her: she had covered for two colleagues with family health issues. The agent surfaces it. He decides what it means.
Kevin Mandia founded Mandiant and now runs attack agents at Armadin. His read on a16z: if you have humans in the detect and respond loop, you're going to be too slow.
Three jobs, three answers. The agent does work nobody was doing, hands the decision to a person, or takes the person out of the loop.
Sources: Munjal Shah (Hippocratic AI), CareTalk Podcast, "Voice AI Is Expanding Access to Healthcare," Oct 2, 2026. Jon Harmeling (Chick-fil-A Miami Shores), Restaurant Technology Guys, "How a Chick-fil-A Operator Uses AI to Lead," Oct 5, 2026. Kevin Mandia (Armadin), a16z, "Building Defense for the Agentic Era," Oct 6, 2026. a16z is an investor in Armadin.