Yandex Cloud CEO: AI agents will shift specialists from routine work to oversight

AI adoption in companies will cut down on routine tasks but change what specialists working on important problems actually do, according to Grigory Atrepyev, general director of Yandex Cloud.

In an interview with Vedomosti, Atrepyev described today's agents as an extra tool that saves time on routine work - running calculations, digging through huge volumes of files including audio recordings of meetings, and turning all of it into a readable format. That, he said, lets employees focus on what genuinely matters.

Over the medium term, he expects the role of specialists to shift. Employees will do less by hand and spend more time managing agentic systems, Atrepyev said, with their main value lying in taking on risks and bearing responsibility for the result.

On accountability for an AI agent's mistakes - leaking confidential data or causing destructive action - he stressed that even ready-made agents should operate through confirmation of significant actions. An agent can gather data and propose a solution, he noted, but changing information, writing to a system or applying a patch to a repository must be confirmed by a human. That checkpoint should not disappear, he added, even though any of us can also miss an error.