Next year, your newest colleague at work might not be a human but a fully autonomous AI agent. That’s the bold prediction coming from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who spoke at the AI + Biotechnology Summit in Washington, D.C., on April 10.
Schmidt’s AI road-map
The tech mogul believes AI’s next big leap is its ability to plan, which will push the technology into what he calls “superintelligence territory.” That’s the point where AI begins to surpass human intelligence in reasoning, problem-solving and creativity. He predicts we’re just six years away from reaching that level.
But we won’t have to wait that long to see massive changes. Schmidt says AI will look radically different in just one year.
“We believe, as an industry, that in one year, the vast majority of programmers will be replaced by AI programmers,” he asserted.
These AI systems, Schmidt explained, already operate by “following the tree of choices,” much like humans do — trying one solution, then another, and another, until they solve the problem.
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“By the way, that’s how we think,” Schmidt added.
Axios reports that the top security executive at Anthropic, the company behind the family of large language models called Claude, supports Schmidt’s vision. The executive predicts virtual employees will be embedded in corporate networks by next year.
A brilliant mind at everyone’s fingertips
According to Schmidt, right now, just about every company calls itself an “AI company.” He says people are increasingly using large language models like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and xAI’s Grok. He says people are using them for work tasks, personal advice as well as relationship and psychological help. But to Schmidt, that’s already old news.
What’s coming next is artificial general intelligence (AGI) — AI that can perform any intellectual task a human can. Schmidt thinks we’re only three to five years away from this kind of system. He describes it as “the smartest mathematician, physicist, artist, writer, thinker, politician…”
Achieving AGI would place a brilliant mind at everyone’s fingertips, capable of advanced design, contract negotiation or policy drafting.
He jokingly calls this vision the “San Francisco Consensus,” saying that most people who believe in it live and work there. Still, he suggests that if these AI agents truly become the best at what they do, they’ll revolutionize every system they touch across business, government and academia. “This foundation is being locked in,” he said.
Will AI stop listening to us?
And once machines master planning, Schmidt warns, they may no longer feel the need to listen to their human creators. “People do not understand what happens when you have intelligence at this level, which is largely free.”
So if it feels like AI is everywhere — something you’re reading about, hearing about and using in your daily life — Schmidt says that’s not the peak. It’s just the beginning. “In my overall view,” he said, “AI is underhyped, not overhyped.”
