From Copilots to Colleagues: What the Agent Era...

For the last two years, "AI assistant" meant roughly the same thing everywhere: a chat box you typed into, got an answer from, and then went back to doing your actual job. Useful, sometimes impressive, but fundamentally passive. You asked, it answered. That model is getting replaced. Not gradually — the shift happening in 2025–26 is more structural than that. The Copilot model had a ceiling Copilots were built around a simple loop: human prompts, AI responds, human decides what to do next. The h