As AI agents transform work, the Bay Area is on the cutting edge

Imagine tapping into intelligence for your business almost like turning on a water faucet.  

The rise of AI agents that can reason and solve problems—essentially providing intelligence on tap—is transforming what companies can achieve and increasing productivity in ways that weren’t possible before.   

Our 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report provides insights into how agentic AI is changing the business calculus for organizations around the globe. The report shows that here in the Bay Area, with its uniquely dynamic tech ecosystem, leaders are ahead of the curve.  

“This kind of human-agent collaboration is the wave of the future, and what we’re seeing in the Bay Area is that the future is already here,” said Shawn Villaron, vice president and general manager of PowerPoint and Microsoft Bay Area region leader. “Bay Area companies are empowering their employees to achieve more by reshaping business processes with AI.”

A remarkable 90% of leaders in the Bay Area plan to scale workforce capacity with digital labor in the next 12 to 18 months, compared to 82% globally and nationally, underscoring Silicon Valley’s role on the vanguard of integrating AI into everyday workflows.   

Digital labor to the rescue  

And it’s not just tech companies in the Bay Area that are driving this transformation.  

San Francisco-based Wells Fargo built a Microsoft Teams app/agent integrated with state-of-the-art large language models for 35,000 bankers across 4,000 branches. The agent provides instant access to guidance on 1,700 internal procedures, so employees can quickly locate the information they need. The result? Now, 75% of searches happen through the agent, cutting response times from 10 minutes to just 30 seconds.

It’s an example of the dramatic changes underway as we move beyond the days of intelligence being a constrained resource in business—dependent on hiring just the right people with the right training.  

Now we’re at a major inflection point. “Digital colleagues” can take on specific tasks with human direction, from developing a go-to-market plan to debugging code. With this kind of intelligence available on demand, companies can scale capacity as needed. 

Frontier Firms and human-agent teams  

Around the globe, organizations face a capacity gap: too much work to do and a workforce that already feels maxed out.  

That pressure is particularly acute in the Bay Area, where 57% of leaders emphasize the need to boost productivity, compared with 53% globally and 46% in the US. Meanwhile, 79% of the total Bay Area workforce—both employees and leaders—say they’re lacking enough time or energy to do their work.   

But against this backdrop, a new kind of company is emerging, a Frontier Firm powered by a combination of human and digital labor, creating the ability to scale and generate value more quickly.  

“Leaders who are committed to incorporating AI agents will see the effort pay off with increased productivity and employees who have the bandwidth for more strategic and creative problem-solving,” Shawn said.  

Every employee becomes an agent boss

What’s clear is that knowing how to use AI will be a career accelerator.  

Organizations are prioritizing hiring for AI-specific roles, with 82% of Bay Area leaders considering hiring for these positions, above the global average of 78%.  

But before long, everyone will be using AI, with each employee maximizing their impact by becoming an agent boss, someone who builds and manages AI agents to scale more quickly and efficiently.  

This is something many Bay Area leaders are already planning for, with 77% of them saying they’re familiar or extremely familiar with AI agents, compared to just 67% globally. Employees in the Bay Area are also catching up, with 48% reporting familiarity with AI agents, surpassing the global rate of 40%. 

Half of Bay Area managers say they expect AI training or upskilling to become a key responsibility for their teams in the next five years. 

Wells Fargo is already well on the way. In addition to incorporating an agent to help thousands of employees quickly find information, the company has built an AI virtual assistant tool for enabling Treasury sales teams to proactively drive relevant conversations with customers and will use AI to streamline interactions between the front office, underwriters, and operations. 

“Companies that are embracing agents to handle tasks more efficiently are gaining a competitive edge,” Shawn said. “It’s exciting to see how they’re innovating and thinking creatively about a whole new way of doing business.”