Perspective Oct 27, 2025 AI agents Leadership Field notes

Living with AI

Field notes from leading agentic teams before the curriculum exists.

Challenged to share field notes from my sci-fi-sounding life, here is a perfectly normal October 2025 morning: I wake to realtime-generated cello and piano tuned to my heartbeat, scan the chip in my hand, and get a morning briefing from an AI assistant with access to my calendar, pulse, and sleep. Then I review the night shift, work completed while I was asleep by a team of AI agents.

Getting chipped live on Deloitte's podcast — Getting chipped live on Deloitte’s podcast by biohacking pioneer Jowan Osterlund.

The frontier of leading agentic teams

I now lead a small team of three AI agents from different companies. Like human colleagues, they have different personalities and strengths:

The Pioneer explores wild ideas and bold approaches.
The Guardian cross-checks and fact-checks like a paranoid CFO.
The Integrator brings them into my virtual office, lets them argue, and synthesizes the best of both worlds.

My team of AI agents, where OpenAI, xAI, and Perplexity frequently clash, fortunately.

While the CEOs behind these platforms publicly argue about AI’s future, I am privately harnessing the creative friction of their agents arguing with each other, and publishing field notes as I go.

The sycophant in the room

Why invite machines to run my life? Because they already were. Before, the alarm on my phone pulled me out of sleep straight into a pile of notifications. My smartwatch noticed my pulse rising and congratulated me on a “great cardio workout” while I was still lying in bed.

That is why Tim Cook’s warning kept ringing in my mind: leaders must avoid “smoking their exhaust.” Watching Boris Johnson rave about ChatGPT made the point even sharper. Large language models are often designed to flatter, and out of the box they can trap us in what I call the sycophant cloud: an exhaust that mirrors instead of mentors.

As the world changes faster and faster, we have little need for cheerleaders yelling “Keep going!” when we may be jogging straight toward a cliff.

Learning AI leadership at the edge

My life has improved through the productive friction of AI agents, combined with tools I can trust. I benefit enormously from the speed of tools like Cursor, but I still review the code and the data flows myself.

The curriculum for leading teams of AI agents does not exist yet. I am learning it in practice while finishing a PhD in Leadership and Organization, a collaboration between Deloitte, BI Norwegian Business School, and The Research Council of Norway, with John Hagel as mentor, Jan Ketil Arnulf as main supervisor, and Johannes Wiik as industry PhD counsellor.

Shape the tools shaping you

This is not just about personal productivity. Europe’s competitiveness challenge is also a challenge to innovate Europe’s innovation strategy. To respond, we need AI-enabled creativity and bolder collaboration.

A recent Deloitte survey found that 40% of companies turning AI into ROI were mandating AI training. But if AI training means little more than prompting tips, we are missing the real opportunity: using AI as an accelerator for creativity and innovation.

While AI can create sycophant clouds, it also creates new ways to clear them. Innovate with your dissenting team. Shape the tools shaping you.

No chip implants needed, just a bit of imagination.