Lately, I've started to think about AI agents through the lens of two buckets: Leverage and Functions, which is admittedly a reductionist framework, but please bear with me, as I think through this.
Leverage agents
The first lens is leverage agents, which are here to make you orders of magnitude more productive. A leverage agent is your infinite Chief of Staff that drafts, researches, coordinates and executes on your behalf, while you stay in charge and make the calls.
Function agents
The second lens is function agents. They are different. Instead of providing leverage, the agent is doing the job. It's the customer support that runs 24/7 without a human touching it. The agentic engineer that builds your app. The bookkeeper that closes the books on its own, or the agentic CPA that prepares taxes, and pings a human for review.
Why this matters
I keep coming back to this because it shapes almost every decision downstream.
A leverage agent is sold to make someone more productive. A founder buys it because they can now run ops without hiring a head of ops. But a function agent is sold to the organization that decides it no longer needs to fill a role at all. The buyer is different, the pricing is different, the product is different, and the go-to-market looks nothing alike.
Most agent startups I talk to haven't thought carefully about which of these they are, and you can feel it in the product. The positioning is muddled, the pricing doesn't quite make sense, and the GTM feels off.
There's an interesting transition here as well. Most companies will probably start with a leverage agent, and earn the right to become function agents over time. Your agent works alongside the human first, learns the workflow, builds trust, and then gradually take over more and more of the process until the human steps away entirely.
It's the copilot to autopilot transition.
This is still a rough framework, but we are seeing it play out in coding, and I think this lens is useful to apply to every vertical, as what's happening to software engineering will most likely happen to every vertical and job function.
But challenge me on it. What am I missing?
/k