AI office is at its 1972 moment; what's missing is human-agent delegation
36Kr republished a speculative essay by Tan Li, co-founder of Shushi Technology, arguing that today's AI office products sit roughly where enterprise software was around 1972: Tencent WorkBuddy, Alibaba's Qwen Office and ByteDance's Doubao Work compete hard, but no shared abstraction yet ties them together. He proposes "responsibility conservation" — every agent action must trace back to a human authorization and leave an auditable record — and says the endgame is a "digital employee" that delivers outcomes rather than an efficiency tool sold per seat or per token. The real bottleneck, he argues, is that authentication, authorization and audit for human-agent delegation remain unstandardized, with policy design still largely blank.
With vendors racing out AI office products, the essay offers a debatable framework: what gates adoption may be authorization and audit plumbing rather than feature count.