Generative AI makes things; agentic AI does things by itself. That’s the line I brought home from Exponential Day 2026 (8 July, World Trade Center Barcelona), organised by ACCIÓ, the Catalan government’s business competitiveness agency, around agentic AI as “the new frontier”: systems that analyse, decide and act on their own. My other note of the day: project management with agentic AI. Homework.
The keynote was Daniel Susskind on AI, work and the future of economic value. White-collar work isn’t safe anymore. The “AI fallacy” is believing machines must think like us to beat us: they don’t. Jobs break down into tasks, and in a McKinsey figure he quoted, only about 5% of jobs are fully automatable, but in 60% of them at least 30% of the tasks are. His bet: less mass unemployment, more mass reshuffling, with education as the main answer and human presence keeping its value wherever the relationship is the point (care, teaching, art, advice). The long version is in A World Without Work.
Keynote video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqf2LAt9jRQ
https://punttic.gencat.cat/en/article/exponential-day-2026-explores-new-frontier