Exponential Day 2026: The New Era of AI - Agentic AI
Attended Exponential Day 2026, organized by ACCIÓ, focused on "The new era of AI: agentic AI". A highlight was Daniel Susskind's talk, where he reflected from a philosophical standpoint on how agentic AI will transform businesses through task automation, exploring the deeper implications for work and society.
What was Exponential Day 2026?
Exponential Day is ACCIÓ's flagship technology event, organised by the Government of Catalonia's agency for business competitiveness. The 2026 edition took place on 8 July at the World Trade Center in Barcelona under the theme "The new era of AI: agentic AI". It brought together companies, researchers and public institutions to discuss how autonomous AI agents are moving from demos into real business operations.
Daniel Susskind on AI agents and the future of work
The highlight for me was Daniel Susskind's keynote. Rather than a product pitch, he approached agentic AI from a philosophical angle: what it means when software stops being a tool we operate and starts completing tasks on our behalf.
His central idea was that AI agents will transform companies not by replacing entire jobs overnight, but by automating individual tasks, and that the organisations that benefit most will be the ones that rethink how work is divided between people and machines.
From chatbots to agents: what actually changes
A chatbot answers questions. An AI agent takes actions: it reads an email, checks a database, fills in a form, triggers the next step in a workflow. That shift from answering to doing is why agentic AI matters so much for business process automation.
It turns repetitive, rule-based work (data entry, document handling, reporting, customer follow-ups) into something that can run with minimal human supervision.
What agentic AI means for small and medium businesses
The conversation at Exponential Day often centred on large companies, but I think SMEs have the most to gain. A small team loses a big share of its week to repetitive tasks, and it can't hire people just to handle them.
Well-scoped AI agents let SMEs automate those tasks, increase productivity and free people up for work that needs human judgement. The key is to start small: pick one repetitive process, automate it end-to-end, measure the time saved, and scale from there.
My takeaways as an AI engineer
Building AI systems day to day, I left with a clear conclusion: the technology is ready. The real work is in integration: connecting agents to real data, real tools and real processes safely. That is exactly the kind of problem I enjoy solving.