Amid Silicon Valley scramble for AI agent productivity, "token anxiety" takes hold
Marketplace Tech
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 11 May 2026
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There's a new flex in Silicon Valley: how big is your AI agent swarm? They can work on your behalf, autonomously, 24/7, on whatever goal you give them. You might think having an army of AI minions could free up some time, maybe make work more chill. But, you’d be wrong, as Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino reports.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | My bots are doing more than your bots. |
| 0:04.3 | From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. |
| 0:06.7 | I'm Stephanie Hughes. |
| 0:17.0 | There's a new flex in Silicon Valley. |
| 0:20.0 | How big is your agents form? AI agents, that is. They can work on your behalf autonomously 24-7 on whatever goal you give them. You might think having an army of AI minions could free up some time, maybe make work more chill. Well, in Silicon Valley, you'd be wrong. Marketplace's Megan McCarty |
| 0:38.8 | Carrino has that. At a Menlo Park Starbucks, down the road from all the big venture capital firms, |
| 0:45.2 | John Wong hosts a meetup for the AI agent Curious. Welcome, join us. Hello. Hey, grab a chair. |
| 0:52.5 | Wong is a tech industry veteran who runs his own startup investment network, |
| 0:57.2 | and he spent the last few months trying to automate as much busy work as he can. |
| 1:02.4 | So I have right now eight bots running. |
| 1:05.0 | So, for example, in the morning at 6 a.m., it goes to Reddit, |
| 1:09.5 | looks at the top threads in the topics I'm interested in. And I told it by 7 a.m., it goes to Reddit, looks at the top threads and the topics I'm interested in. |
| 1:12.4 | And I told it by 7 a.m. in my inbox, I want a report on the top news items I'm interested in. |
| 1:19.3 | Wong used to pay for a human assistant in the Philippines. Now, he just pays for tokens. |
| 1:26.0 | That's how AI usage is measured. |
| 1:28.4 | I also asked it to write my resume for me today. |
| 1:32.7 | I said, here's my LinkedIn profile. |
| 1:35.5 | I need a professional-looking resume. |
| 1:38.2 | A crowd of about a dozen showed up on this Wednesday night last month, |
| 1:42.4 | entrepreneurs, big tech workers, and hobbyist tinkerers. |
| 1:46.5 | Kevin State runs sales strategy for an AI startup. |
| 1:50.1 | I feel like our whole company should just shut down and focus on this for about a month. |
... |
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