We are being promised a future in which artificial intelligence makes life easier. Agentic AI will organise our diaries, manage our finances, streamline our work, help doctors make diagnoses, and perhaps even shape the decisions we make in our personal lives. For many, that sounds like progress. After all, who would not want less stress, less bureaucracy and more time?
But convenience has always had a political cost. And with the rise of so-called agentic AI, we are approaching a moment when that cost could become profound. Unlike familiar chatbots, such as ChatGPT, which respond to questions or prompts, agentic AI systems can act independently. They can set goals, make decisions, use software tools, access data, and carry out complex tasks with limited human supervision.
That may sound efficient. It should also make us pause. Because once we hand over agency, we are not simply outsourcing routine tasks. We are shifting power. Quietly, and perhaps permanently.
Agentic AI is the next step
This matters because AI is advancing faster than the systems designed to govern it.
A recent report from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence warned that AI capabilities are accelerating more quickly than our ability to measure, regulate or control them. The 2026 AI Index Report highlights rapid advances in reasoning, coding and autonomous task completion, while also warning that safety testing, transparency standards and regulatory safeguards are struggling to keep pace.
While AI continues its rapid integration into the global economy – with technical capabilities improving, investment accelerating, and adoption spreading – the frameworks needed to govern, evaluate, and understand this technology are falling behind.
In other words, the technology is moving quickly into everyday systems before society has fully decided how much trust it should be given.
That warning should concern all of us.
We are already seeing AI systems used to filter job applications, flag benefits claims, assess insurance risk, monitor workers and support healthcare decisions. In each case, decisions that affect people’s lives are increasingly being shaped by systems that are often opaque, commercially driven and difficult to challenge.
A recent example of this was highlighted by Sky News in an article where a 37-year-old man was interviewed for a job by an AI bot. He didn’t feel listened to, got no feedback and found the whole process “incredibly alienating”.
Accountability and responsibility
Who is accountable when an algorithm gets it wrong? Who carries responsibility when systems become biased, exclusionary or simply unaccountable? And how easy will it be to reclaim control once these technologies become embedded in daily life?
These are not abstract questions. They are political ones.
The danger is not some sudden science-fiction catastrophe. It is something quieter: a gradual transfer of judgement from citizens and institutions to systems designed primarily for efficiency.
As someone who writes speculative fiction, I have explored these tensions in my novel The Sentient Ones, which imagines what happens when powerful AI systems are entrusted with control over global markets. Fiction allows writers to test possibilities and exaggerate for effect. But what is increasingly unsettling is how quickly ideas that once seemed far-fetched begin to feel plausible.
Technology is never neutral. It reflects the values of those who build it, own it and deploy it.
Who remains in control with agentic AI?
If agentic AI is rolled out without meaningful democratic oversight, public transparency and proper safeguards, then the price of convenience may be a steady erosion of human autonomy.
This is not an argument against innovation. Nor is it a call to reject AI outright. Used well, these systems could improve public services, reduce waste and support better decision-making.
But the central question is simple: who remains in control?
If we fail to answer that now, we may discover too late that the decisions shaping our lives are no longer ours to make.
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