[Editor’s Note: Agents of Transformation is an independent GeekWire series and March 24, 2026 event, underwritten by Accenture, exploring the people, companies, and ideas behind AI agents.]
Oren Etzioni got so frustrated flipping between browser windows and following ChatGPT’s step-by-step instructions that he finally asked: Do you work for me, or do I work for you?
ChatGPT’s answer at the time: no, it couldn’t actually do the work for him. Etzioni, a computer scientist who has been building AI systems since the late 1980s, says filling that gap between AI talking and AI taking action is what defines this moment in the technology’s evolution.
But even as AI agents move from concept to reality, Etzioni says the “jagged edge” of functionality remains a stubborn problem: give an agent one request and it saves an hour and a half of work, then give it something nearly identical and it produces garbage.
“We haven’t achieved artificial reliability,” he said. “That’s still a ways off.”
Etzioni spoke with GeekWire at an event hosted by Accenture in Bellevue, Wash., last week, with an audience that included leaders from Microsoft. The University of Washington professor is co-founder of AI agent startup Vercept, founder and technical director of the AI2 Incubator, venture partner at Madrona, and former founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI.
Over the course of the evening, Etzioni fielded questions about the emerging landscape of AI agents, the platform competition among the major tech companies, China’s rise in AI research, and the evolving threat of deepfakes to democracy. He also offered some sharp words for OpenAI and advice for leaders navigating AI adoption.
On agents: Etzioni said what’s working now is delegating small, specific workflows — the kind of tasks that used to require flipping between apps and following instructions manually.
Vercept, for example, lets an agent see what’s on your screen, find the buttons, read the text, and execute tasks directly, rather than relying on what he called the “rickety infrastructure” of APIs and web scraping that breaks whenever something changes.
The bigger picture is messier. Etzioni described Moltbook — the bot-only social network that attracted 1.6 million AI agents over a weekend — as overhyped in its current form, but a signal of what’s coming: a future where software agents interact with each other at scale.
He was blunt about the risks: Moltbook is a “security nightmare,” with agents running on users’ machines, accessing private information, and reading externally posted text that nobody controls, making them vulnerable to prompt injection attacks.
Etzioni pushed back on more dramatic framings of the moment, disagreeing with Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s claim that we’re witnessing the birth of a new digital species.
“These are still tools,” he said. “Power tools, but still tools working on our behalf.”
On the platform competition: Asked how he sees the race among Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, and Anthropic, he said he’d short OpenAI stock, if he did that sort of thing.
“They’re running around like a thousand chickens with their heads cut off,” he said, questioning whether the company has a coherent business model beyond its flagship chatbot. “Sure, they’re printing money on ChatGPT, but that’s not their business.”
He’s more bullish on Google, which he described as having the advantage of being vertically integrated, from chips to data to models to talent. “They start on the back foot,” he said, “but Google is poised to — I think the technical phrase is — kick their ass.”
Anthropic and OpenAI are racing toward IPOs as they burn through cash. Once they’re public, Etzioni noted, the quarter-by-quarter results will reveal who’s actually winning.
On China: Etzioni said the stereotype that the country’s AI work is derivative is no longer true.
He pointed to research his team did at the Allen Institute for AI, tracking academic papers at top AI conferences, which showed Chinese papers rising not just in volume but in quality. That trend, he said, has played out in open-source models and technical innovation as well.
“I’m actually a China hawk — I’m very concerned about China’s role in the world,” he said. “But the solution is not to underestimate, because that would be a mistake.”
On deepfakes: Etzioni spent more than a year running TrueMedia.org, a nonprofit he founded to build tools for newsrooms and fact-checkers to detect deepfakes in the lead-up to the 2024 elections. The good news, he said, is that deepfakes didn’t significantly change election outcomes. The bad news is that the technology has gotten much cheaper and easier to deploy.
Looking forward, he’s concerned about a “denial of democracy attack” — not a single viral deepfake but thousands of AI agents flooding congressional, school board, and mayoral races with coordinated fake media at a scale that current detection systems can’t handle.
“The last war, which was 2024, we won,” he said. “The next war is coming.”
On leadership: Etzioni said AI adoption is not something leaders can delegate to a CIO or general counsel. His three pieces of advice:
- Use AI yourself, whether you’re the CEO or the janitor.
- Build incentive structures that encourage your team to experiment with it.
- Don’t just use AI to do existing work faster; look for things only possible with AI.
“The real gold,” he said, “is when you’re getting AI to do new things that we just didn’t do before.”
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