At the Bank of America Global Asia Summit in Hong Kong, Dr. Lamia Youseff, CEO of JC12.ai and former AI executive at various BigTech companies, delivered the opening keynote titled “A New Investment Paradigm in the Age of AI: How Agentic AI Is Reshaping Work, Value Chains, and Labor Economics.”
Dr. Youseff built on a talk that was heavily cited at BofA’s New York headquarters a year ago, to present the economic and organizational implications of Agentic AI, autonomous, goal-driven systems that change how work is assigned, carried out and monetized.She highlighted the pressures on traditional workforce and investment models, drawing from research from Stanford and MIT and her own research on AI Value Chain. Due to the fact that AI agents are increasingly able to perform complex cognitive tasks, enterprise leaders and policymakers must reevaluate how value is created and how human capital is developed in an AI-native economy.
Dr. Youseff emphasized that in the future, productivity will be measured not by automation but by the effectiveness of collaboration between humans and agentic systems across the AI value chain. Investors who put their money into workforce resilience, retool their value chains, and take action now to shape the future of work will be the decade’s winners.The speech strengthened her prediction for 2025 – the year when Agentic AI goes from possibility to transformation.