Will you love your AI twin?
In our workplaces, AI is rapidly evolving from a supportive assistant to an autonomous agent—and just over the horizon is the emerging concept of a digital AI twin.
With today's agentic AI, systems can independently execute an entire workstream, such as project management, with little need for a human in the loop once the training phase is complete. Tomorrow, it is highly probable that an AI digital twin—an AI-powered replica of your human expertise—will work alongside you.
What challenges and opportunities could we face as we are twinned with AI? What relationship will you have with your new work twin—love, hate, envy? What risks and opportunities lie ahead in this never-say-never moment?
Drawing on human twin psychology, having a twin can be both a blessing and a burden. Just like a human twin can offer emotional support, your AI twin could act as a reliable workmate, reducing stress and enhancing capabilities such as super-fast logical thinking. On the darker side, it could start to feel like it's taking over—performing better, getting more recognition, even overshadowing you.
But is this really possible? Let's dig into the tech side.
Where are we now?
Autonomous AI agents are already in use across the business world and in our personal lives. Think self-driving cars, advanced fraud detection, drug discovery, and customer service chatbots that actually help.
Here's how an agentic AI Help Desk Assistant might work: it could personalize support based on what your company knows about your setup. Say your Teams app crashes every time you try to join a meeting. You submit a help desk ticket before a crucial early morning call. An AI agent receives it, reviews your computer's hardware and software update status, researches recent Microsoft bug fixes, identifies the issue from the IT-approved list, and installs the update. Voila! You no longer have to wait for an IT agent to become available—and the AI could fix the problem faster than a human could.
Where could we go in the future?
In the next 5–10 years, we're likely to see more sophisticated and general-purpose agentic AI systems that can:
· Manage more long-term goals, such as planning and executing projects over weeks or months
· Integrate deeply with healthcare providers
· Oversee smart home systems with advanced control
· Support the broader adoption of self-driving cars.
Back to Twinning
AI agents will also become more capable collaborators, especially in complex fields such as research, healthcare, and engineering. For instance, scientists could soon rely on agentic AI to autonomously explore datasets, generate hypotheses, and suggest experiments. Google is already experimenting with this via AI co-scientist, a virtual collaborator built with Gemini 2.0.
So the question remains—will you love your AI twin?
As human twins grow up, they learn values, guardrails, and decision-making frameworks from their families. Who will teach your AI twin what matters to you? Will you consent to share the personal information needed
to learn from you? Will our privacy standards expand again? And when you leave your job, will your AI twin come with you, or stay behind?
As agentic AI becomes more autonomous, it raises serious questions about accountability, transparency, and ethics. We'll need robust ethical frameworks, explainable AI models, and governance systems to match the technology's growing capability.
Agentic AI represents a leap forward—unlocking systems that can operate with greater autonomy, adaptability, and judgment. While today's systems are still relatively narrow in scope, the next decade is likely to bring broader, more general-purpose agents that redefine how we think about and interact with machines and how machines can behave on their own. The time to grapple with these questions is now, so we can balance innovation with ethics and ensure that agentic AI aligns with our values and delivers real benefits to humanity.
Authored by Tim Walmsley, Head of Transformation and Change Management, APCO MENA, and Kristy Lapidus, Senior Director AI & Digital Transformation, APCO Gagen MacDonald.
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