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3 Minute Read

 What's Different About This New Batch Of AI Tools

By now you've heard the blaring sirens that something is different about the new batch of AI tools released over the last few weeks. With new updates coming almost daily, keeping up with the waves of technology change is harder than ever. In today's short read, we break down for you what just changed, and what it means for public affairs practitioners. 

The Agentic AI Era Is Here

If you've been reading along with this newsletter, then unlike many others in our space, you weren't blindsided by the developments of the last few weeks. In June of last year, we told you that one term was about to change your career. That term is "agentic." It refers to AI that does not simply answer questions in a chatbot, but that takes actions on your behalf.

Until now, most people used AI in the following pattern: You typed a question, the AI generated an answer, you read it, you asked another question. Rinse and repeat. This is known as "conversational AI," and chances are, it's how you think about AI today.

Say you wanted to analyze campaign performance data. You'd upload the spreadsheet, describe what you need, wait for the response, ask follow-up questions, and copy the insights into your deck. This was a huge leap forward and created massive productivity gains. But it also had severe limits:

🔱 It couldn't start tasks without you. If you weren't continuously prompting, nothing happened.

🔱 It had no memory between sessions. Every conversation started from zero unless you manually provided context.

🔱 It couldn't touch your actual files. You uploaded, it analyzed, you downloaded. It lived in a chat window, disconnected from where your work actually happened.

🔱 It did exactly what you asked, nothing more. If you forgot to request something crucial, it wouldn't catch your oversight.

Agentic AI Leaves The Chat

The new generation of agentic AI—tools like Claude Cowork, Perplexity Computer, OpenClaw, and similar agents operate on completely different architecture than conversational AI. Instead of responding to individual prompts, they plan multi-step projects, execute them across your actual software stack, and monitor themselves for errors—all without your involvement after the initial instructions.

They create reports, presentations, and spreadsheets; check your email; review your calendar; reorganize your files; and operate your other software tools for you.

This is not an incremental improvement. This is a completely different category of AI. If you're still thinking of AI as "the thing that helps me write faster," you're missing the point about what just changed.

This happens because of three architectural changes:

1. Direct system access. Instead of living in a chat window, these agents read and write files directly on your computer, open applications, and control your browser. When you tell Claude Cowork to "organize my downloads folder," it doesn't tell you how to do it—it actually does it, moving and renaming hundreds of files based on what it sees.

2. Multi-step planning. The agents analyze your request, break it into subtasks, execute them in sequence or parallel, and monitor progress. If step three fails, it tries an alternative approach without bothering you.

3. Persistent memory and scheduled execution. The agents maintain memory across days and weeks, learning your preferences and patterns. They can run on schedules—checking your inbox every morning, updating reports every Friday, monitoring competitor activity continuously.

Here's a simple analogy to keep at hand. Conversational AI TELLS YOU how to plan that trip to Italy. Agentic AI PLANS THE TRIP FOR YOU.

What Agentic AI Means For Public Affairs

Agentic AI has already existed for some time, and you may be using it already without knowing. We've talked about vibe coding here numerous times. Vibe coding is agentic AI for the specific task of coding, and it has already birthed a new generation of software products for public affairs practitioners that are leaving legacy tools behind.

What the new agentic AI tools do is effectively bring vibe coding to a wide swath of every day workflows—conducting tasks on your behalf across all of your tools. This is why Silicon Valley has declared that the new agentic AI tools have inaugurated the "vibe working" era.

Hate that term if you like, but ignore it at your own peril.

Three Ways To Operationalize This Email

🔱 Audit one repeatable task your team does every week—media monitoring, stakeholder research, meeting prep, or something else—and pilot an agentic tool on it this month.

🔱 Give it real work, not a test. Assign one of the new agents something actually on your to-do list. That's the only way to understand agentic AI's real impact.

🔱 Make sure your teams understand the difference between conversational AI (question-answering) and agentic AI (task-executing). Capitalizing on this distinction will define the winners versus the losers in the vibe working era.

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