The EU is banning the usage of AI-powered digital assistants throughout on-line conferences. Such assistants are sometimes used to transcribe, take notes, and even file visuals and audio throughout a video convention.
In a presentation from the European Fee delivered to European Digital Innovation Hubs earlier this month, there’s a be aware on the “On-line Assembly Etiquette” slide that states “No AI Brokers are allowed.”
AI brokers are instruments that may carry out complicated, multi-step duties autonomously typically by interacting with purposes, corresponding to video conferencing software program. For instance, Salesforce makes use of AI brokers to name gross sales leads.
The Fee confirmed this presentation was the primary time this rule had been imposed however declined to clarify why when questioned by Politico. There is no such thing as a particular EU laws that covers AI brokers, however the AI fashions that energy them might want to abide by the strict and controversial guidelines of the AI Act.
AI brokers elevate safety considerations
Whereas AI notetakers and different agent varieties usually are not inherently a safety menace, in keeping with a 2025 report from world AI consultants, safety dangers stem from the person being unaware of what their AI brokers are doing, their innate capability to function exterior of the person’s management, and potential AI-to-AI interactions. These components make AI brokers much less predictable than commonplace fashions.
SEE: How Can AI Be Used Safely? Researchers From Harvard, MIT, IBM & Microsoft Weigh In
Tech corporations do should be cautious when selling merchandise that may accomplish an rising quantity with out the person’s consciousness. One of many greatest cautionary tales is that of Microsoft Recall, an AI instrument that allowed customers to manage their PC or search by recordsdata utilizing pure language.
The comfort got here at a value: Recall captured screenshots of energetic home windows each few seconds, saving them as a timeline, elevating considerations about privateness and knowledge utilization and resulting in vital launch delays. Microsoft has since launched a collection of brokers particularly designed to sort out cyber threats.
AI brokers are rising in prevalence
This hasn’t stopped the AI gamers from handing over extra management to their fashions. Anthropic added a Laptop Use function to its Claude Sonnet chatbot in October 2024, which gave it the power to navigate desktop apps, transfer cursors, click on buttons, and kind textual content. Its deep analysis operate, introduced this week, additionally responds to prompts “agentically,” as does Microsoft’s equal.
Final month, OpenAI expanded its text-to-speech and speech-to-text instruments to agentic fashions, indicating their rising relevancy. In January 2025, OpenAI introduced Operator, an agentic instrument that runs in-browser to autonomously carry out actions corresponding to ordering groceries or reserving excursions.
SEE: EU Invests €1.3 Billion to Enhance AI Adoption & Enhance ‘Digital Competencies’
Anthropic and OpenAI are even working collectively to enhance agent know-how, with the latter including assist for the previous’s Mannequin Context Protocol, an open-source commonplace for connecting AI apps, together with brokers, to knowledge repositories. Anthropic has additionally joined forces with Databricks to assist massive company shoppers construct their very own brokers.
TechRepublic predicted on the finish of 2024 that the usage of AI brokers will surge this yr. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman echoed this in a January weblog publish, saying “we might even see the primary AI brokers ‘be a part of the workforce’ and materially change the output of corporations.”
By 2028, 33% of enterprise software program purposes will embrace agentic AI, up from lower than 1% in 2024, in keeping with Gartner. A fifth of on-line retailer interactions and at the least 15% of day-to-day work choices shall be performed by brokers by that yr.
