Key points

• Forbes has listed twenty AI agents doing real work, and most have turned up in the back office and on the night shift.
• They take over tasks and hand people back the part only people can do.
• What’s really being sold is trust: a human behind the agent, a clear hand-over rule, and care with your data.
• The ripples reach the middle of organisations, small business, and the day your agent meets someone else’s.

Forbes has just put out its first Agentic 20, a list of twenty AI agents doing real work.

I went through all twenty, skipped past the money and the hype, and kept coming back to where these agents have actually turned up.

They’ve turned up in the back office, on the night shift, in the jobs nobody puts their hand up for.

First, what’s agentic AI?

Think about the agents you already know. A travel agent doesn’t just tell you where to go, they organise the trip. A real estate agent doesn’t just describe the house, they get the sale over the line.

An AI agent works the same way. You don’t just ask it a question, you hand it a job, and it goes off and does the steps: the calls, the emails, the forms, the follow-ups.

I wrote more about that back in March, and it’s moved a long way since.

Where they turned up

A quick walk through some of the list, and it reads less like science fiction than you’d think. It reads like the jobs nobody’s ever had time for.

Take the plumber call. Fo, a personal assistant from a start-up called Wajo, will research plumbers, ring for quotes, check your calendar and book the visit, the sort of job that quietly eats half a morning.

When it gets stuck, a trained person quietly steps in and finishes the bit the machine can’t, so you never see it falter.

Another, Town, is built for sole traders, small businesses and small sales teams, for the work that lives in the inbox and dies without follow-up.

For a restaurant owner, that might mean watching suppliers’ price lists for increases. For a recruiter, it’s chasing clients and pulling candidate reports together.

Stuut chases invoices by email, text and phone, the follow-ups that finance teams never quite get to. Forbes reports it collected more than US$21 million for a single client.

Say your car’s been written off and the payout looks low. Salient‘s agent takes over the argument, gathers the file, checks what the car was worth and negotiates with the insurer.

Element451 reads the college applications nobody’s opened yet, nudges students to finish their forms and flags fraud along the way.

And yes, one wants to hear all about your exes before it finds you a date.

It introduces one person at a time, with a reason why, and then books the restaurant. People still want a reason for the introduction.

Then there’s the one that runs shrimp farms in shipping containers alongside the people on site, turning the farm’s data into the day’s jobs.

The company says it trained former construction workers to be shrimp farmers in three weeks.

And in San Francisco, a set of agents from Andon Labs is running an entire store. They write the job ads, interview applicants and manage the people they hire.

The founder says plainly it’s early days and money isn’t the point. He wants to show an agent can do the messy, human work of managing.

Jimmy Lucas’s rule

Jimmy Lucas is a sixth-generation funeral director, and a social worker, and his family has been in the business since 1860.

He runs thirteen funeral homes around Dallas and Fort Worth. He’s built an agent, TeamTangoAI, that answers the calls, texts and website messages that used to fall to his staff or an after-hours answering service.

Each funeral home decides how much of that work the agent takes on.

And I think his reason is the right one. He wants his funeral directors spending more time with families on the worst days of their lives, not less.

He says plainly the goal isn’t to put anyone out of a job. And he has one rule he won’t bend: if someone asks for a real person, the agent puts them through to one, straight away.

I’ve been talking with funeral directors about this for the best part of two decades. I was one of the first to tell them technology would come for parts of their business.

My message has always been the same. At its heart, theirs is a human-to-human business.

In March, at their national convention here, we worked through which parts belong to people: the family guidance, the ritual and ceremony, the storytelling, the grief support. And which parts a machine can quietly carry.

Jimmy Lucas built exactly that, care at the centre of it, and a rule that means a grieving family can always reach a person.

What’s changing is the task list

I’ve been saying for a while that AI is rewriting the task list far more than it’s taking whole jobs, and this list reads like proof.

Nobody on it replaced a funeral director, a farmer or a finance team.

They took a job apart, found the tasks that were eating people’s time, and handed those to a machine. Then they gave people back the part only people can do.

I’ve said for years that work, as we’ve known it, doesn’t really exist anymore. A job is a bundle of tasks, and each task can go to whoever, or whatever, does it best.

I call it a task force, the people doing what people do best and the machines doing the rest. And HUMAND is simply the question of whether a human does each task best, or a machine, or AI, or some mix of the three.

Look at the shrimp farm. The specialist knowledge didn’t disappear. It got built into the system, so someone without years of aquaculture behind them could step in and do good work in three weeks.

What’s really for sale is trust

Read the list closely and you’ll notice the best of these businesses are selling trust, more than an agent that does everything.

The plumber-booking assistant has trained people standing behind it. The inbox one makes a selling point of what it won’t do: it doesn’t train on its customers’ data, and it deletes most of what it doesn’t need after fifteen days.

Stripe’s Link gives shopping agents a one-time card for the exact amount, so the agent can pay without ever seeing your real card.

And the funeral director’s rule is about trust too. You can always reach a person.

Underneath it all sits the question of who answers for an agent. My view hasn’t changed since the nail gun piece: the business that sets the tool to work owns what it does.

The ripples

When something moves into the background like this, the ripples are what I want to talk about.

The first ripple is the hand-over rule. Ask for a person and you get one is going to become the rule in every industry, and the businesses that design for it from the start will be the ones people trust.

Then there’s the middle of the organisation. If an agent can manage a shop, the middle of an organisation is changing along with the bottom of it.

I’ve been asking where a business learns its judgement once those first rungs and middle rungs get thinner. The shop in San Francisco is a live experiment in exactly that.

Small business may well gain the most, because most of these agents are built for the work that falls through the cracks when there’s no one spare, the call after hours, the invoice nobody chased, the email that never got a reply, and that’s every small business I know.

And then your agent meets theirs. One company on the list builds agents for tax offices, working the other side of the counter. One state official sees room for 20 to 30 per cent more audits.

The near future is your agent talking to the tax office’s agent, your supplier’s agent and your customer’s agent, often before any person’s involved.

So what would you want your agent to say on your behalf, and what would you never let it say?

Your immediate futures

Whatever the size of your business, I’d start with the task list this week.

I’d take one job in the business, just one, and write down every task in it, especially the ones done after hours or put off till the end of the week. That list is where an agent would start, so you may as well know it first.

I’d decide the hand-over rule too, when a customer gets a person and how quickly, before someone else decides it for you, and I’d make sure your people know it.

And know what you’d do with the time. The funeral director knew straight away: more time with families. If you can’t answer that for your own business, the hours you get back will simply fill up with more of the same.

The question I’m left with

The agents have clocked on, and they’ve gone straight for the jobs nobody wanted.

So I’ve got one back for you. If an agent gave you back five hours this week, what would you do with them, and would your customers notice?

Choose forward.

If you’d like a short read every Tuesday on what’s coming and what it means for your work: welcome.morrismisel.com/join

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Morris Misel is a foresight strategist, keynote speaker, and trusted adviser. He works with leaders, organisations, and boards to interpret what’s changing and make better decisions about what comes next. Heard by more than a million people a year on stage and in the media.

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Questions people ask

What is the Forbes Agentic 20?

It’s a list Forbes published on 8 October 2026 of twenty AI agents doing real work. It runs from answering a funeral home’s calls after hours to chasing unpaid invoices and running shrimp farms.

What’s the difference between an AI agent and a chatbot?

A chatbot answers you. An agent goes and does the thing: it books, chases, negotiates or fills in the form, usually across several steps and several apps.

Are AI agents replacing jobs?

On this list, mostly no. They take over particular tasks, usually the repetitive, after-hours, chasing-up kind, so people can spend their time on the part only people can do.

What is a hand-over rule?

It’s when, and how quickly, a customer gets a real person. One funeral director’s rule is simple: ask for a person and you get one, straight away.

Who’s responsible when an agent gets it wrong?

The business that set it to work. An agent is a tool, and the person or business using a tool answers for what it does.

Are AI agents only for big companies?

No. Several on the list are aimed squarely at small business and sole traders, because the work they take on is exactly what falls through the cracks when there’s no one spare.

Where should a small business start with AI agents?

Pick one job, write down every task in it, and mark the ones done after hours or put off until Friday. That’s where an agent would start, so it’s worth knowing the list first.

Sources

• Forbes, Anna Tong and Rashi Shrivastava, 8 October 2026: The Agentic 20: AI Agents Doing Real Stuff.
• Morris Misel, keynote to the Funerals Australia National Convention, Sunshine Coast, 21 March 2026.