A practical, non-technical guide for business leaders, entrepreneurs, and curious minds

“Agents are (…) bringing about the biggest revolution in computing since we went from typing commands to tapping on icons.” — Bill Gates
“AI agents will become the primary way we interact with computers in the future.” — Satya Nadella
“The age of agentic AI is here”— Jensen Huang

In a world where ChatGPT took us by storm, a far more powerful revolution is unfolding: AI Agents. Like Jarvis in Iron Man or Samantha in Her, these intelligent systems can execute actions, learn from experience, and orchestrate digital interactions with minimal human supervision. They promise to redefine business and society.

However, behind the excitement lies a crucial reality: a significant gap between promise and reality.

This comprehensive guide on agentic AI cuts through the hype and offers a clear, jargon-free strategic roadmap to understanding and applying this technology. The authors bring a rare perspective, having implemented agentic AI across diverse organizations—from global enterprises to agile startups—witnessing both remarkable successes and sobering failures.

Through illuminating case studies and hands-on experiments, the authors reveal:

• A step-by-step method for identifying high-value agentic opportunities and building impactful agents in your business, work, and personal life

• The secrets behind today’s most successful agentic transformations at scale: cutting costs by over 25% while boosting customer satisfaction by over 40%

• Approaches to seize the new opportunities of the Agent Economy—new business models, Agentic-driven startups, rapid scaling, and game-changing revenue opportunities.

• Hands-on guidance to navigate common pitfalls such as workflow integration, error handling, data quality, agent control, and user adoption

• The new mindset and skills required to lead effectively in a world where humans and AI agents need to work seamlessly together

• The profound impact of agentic AI on society, employment, education, and our personal lives

AI agents create what the authors call “compounding intelligence advantages”—the more they’re used, the smarter they become, creating an accelerating gap between early adopters and laggards. Hence, those who understand and leverage AI agents today will define the next business era.

The question isn’t whether AI agents will transform your industry—it’s how you will lead that change. Every revolution demands foresight and responsibility. This book challenges you to not just adopt agentic AI, but to shape it with purpose and integrity.

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How did we build large language models? How do they think, if they think? What will the world look like if we have billions of AIs that are as smart as humans, or even smarter?

In a series of in-depth interviews with leading AI researchers and company founders—including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, MIRI cofounder Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—Dwarkesh Patel provides the first comprehensive and contemporary portrait of the technology that is transforming our world.

Drawn from his interviews on the Dwarkesh Podcast, these curated excerpts range from the technical details of how LLMs work to the possibility of an AI takeover or explosive economic growth. Patel’s conversations cut through the noise to explore the topics most compelling to those at the forefront of the field: the power of scaling, the potential for misalignment, the sheer input required for AGI, and the economic and social ramifications of superintelligence. The book is also a standalone introduction to the technology. It includes over 170 definitions and visualizations, explanations of technical points made by guests, classic essays on the theme from other writers, and unpublished interviews with Open Philanthropy research analyst Ajeya Cotra and Anthropic cofounder Jared Kaplan.

The Scaling Era offers readers unprecedented insight into a transformative moment in the development of AI—and a vision of what comes next.

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