The oft-discussed topic of "AI employees" - will they replace humans?

On March 12, 2024, Cognition, a US IT venture company, suddenly announced a new AI called "Devin" that it was developing in-house on YouTube. The following text was written in the description of the video.

"Introducing Devin, the world's first fully autonomous AI software engineer." The video showed an AI that received a vague order from a human, such as "I want you to make this kind of website," then built the site structure itself, planned the tasks for implementation, programmed, corrected any errors that occurred, and finally completed a website according to the order.

AI using large-scale language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, was built solely on the premise of supporting human work. That alone excited people around the world as something that would greatly change the way humans work, but "Devin" was a technology that went far beyond that. Being fully autonomous means that AI can complete tasks on its own, and what is in sight beyond this technology is a workplace without humans.

In the movie "Terminator 2," the AI ​​of the future showed its fangs to humanity. The rebellion of AI due to the singularity is a sci-fi story from a long time ago, but when fully autonomous AI like "Devin" appears, it makes you worry about how much room there will be for humans to intervene in work. Fortunately or unfortunately, "Devin" has not yet been released to the public.

The official website has a waitlist for early experience, so you can just register and wait for your turn. However, Cognition has announced a partnership with Microsoft. In other words, in the future, it is planned to integrate "Devin" with Microsoft Azure, which is used by programmers all over the world. What will happen to the division of AI and human responsibilities?

In fact, AI has already begun to advance into the workplace. Recently, more and more websites are using chatbots, some of which use generative AI, and there are more companies offering a service called "AI employees" than we imagine. Try searching for "AI employee" on your computer. You will be surprised at how many different fields AI employees are being employed and working in.

▶With the advent of ChatGPT, the PC magazine section of bookstores began to stock a large number of books explaining generative AI. Now, generative AI books have become as commonplace as books on how to use office software.

What are AI employees? We spoke to FiveVai, Inc., which actually develops and provides AI employees to companies, about the current situation of AI employees. FiveVai, Inc. was founded in 2015 with human resource development and digital transformation support as its core business. By providing human resource development and digital transformation support in parallel, the company has supported growth while providing solutions to the challenges its customers face.

The company began offering its "AI employee" service using generative AI as part of its digital transformation support in 2023. "FiveVai's AI employee is an effort to evolve in-house operations by using AI to support them. Currently, it is being introduced in the beauty and financial industries, and we have received positive feedback from customers," says Kazuyo Machida, who works in the company's digital transformation division.

The trigger for FiveVai to work on AI employee services was the emergence of ChatGPT. "With the emergence of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, an environment has been created where AI can be easily used even without specialized knowledge. This is the "democratization" of generative AI. AI, which was previously only available to a limited number of companies, can now be easily introduced by small and medium-sized enterprises and used to work on digital transformation.

We felt that these could dramatically improve the efficiency of white-collar work, so we conducted research. If it becomes possible to improve operations using generative AI, it should be a breath of fresh air in business."