50 Acres And A Humanoid Robot With An AI Avatar

April 28, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We have made a joke for over the past year that sometime in the not-too-distant future, when we are born, we will be issued three things: Some kind of unique identifier such as a Social Security number in the United States, a software-based collection of AI agents to teach us and to do self-driven education about the world, and a humanoid robot that can embody that collection of AI agents – one might call it a Purson – to keep us safe as we grow.

This would at least level the AI playing field to a certain extent.

All jokes have a kernel of truth, but it is equally true that all truths have an element of humor. And this may turn out to be more truth than humor.

We have always perused the “statement streams” about new technologies coming out of Gartner, IDC, and others as a kind of sentiment analysis for how the IT market, and the personal and business cultures that it affects. Gartner is interesting in that most of the press releases that the company puts out starts out with “Gartner Says” and that eliminates any need to try to be clever in a title. Sometimes it starts “Gartner Recommends” or Gartner Survey Finds” just to mix it up a little.

This one, published last Thursday, caught our attention: “Gartner Says One-Third Of Finance Staff Will Occupy “Shared Jobs” By 2029, with AI And An Employee Performing A Single Role Together.”

According to Amanda Joseph-Little, vice president and team manager in the Gartner Finance practice, “Shared jobs reframe the concept of a job from something that is held by a person to something that can be carried out by both AI and a person together. With shared jobs, AI and the person are dependent on one another to perform work successfully.”

There will be two modes of this collaboration between person and purson, to use my word for it, and yes, we just made up that word. (That is not to say that someone else did not independently make it up already. I did not do a Google search or a query of ChatGPT or Claude to check, believing that any unique creativity done with a human brain has value in its own right.)

There will be a managerial mode, with the purson doing the grunt work assembling and sorting data and the person doing the analysis to drive a business decision or action. Interestingly, she calls the other mode the competitive model, not the collaborative model, and here, the purson and the person both analyze the same data and generate outputs, which are then cross-fed between the two, resulting in what Joseph-Little calls “healthy competition.”

I have two thoughts about this. First of all, plenty of students and workers are using chatty foundation models to do their work right now. So this approach that Gartner was talking about for finance departments will be universally applicable, and is happening on its own.

Second of all, why is the number only one third of finance staff and not 100 percent? How does the adoption of AI not proceed along the curve that Ernest Hemmingway once used to describe the bankruptcy of one of his characters: “Gradually, and then suddenly.”

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