Hello, this is Hamamoto from TIMEWELL. Today I want to talk about a technology that's upending the very foundations of how we do business — not just introduce a service.
"The age of agent wars is coming." "Even solo founders will produce billionaires in bulk." "The winners from here are no longer those who own products — they're those who own labor."
This isn't a sci-fi movie tagline. These are the stunning future predictions that Eric Schmidt — former CEO of Alphabet, Google's parent company, and one of the most influential thinkers in the modern technology industry — has been putting out in rapid succession. His words aren't idle prophecy. They cut to the essence of a massive tectonic shift already underway, quietly but unmistakably, beneath the surface.
What Schmidt describes is a future where "AI agents" — entities that think autonomously, form plans, and execute tasks — are woven into every nerve of society. This transformation carries both the destructive force and the generative power to completely overturn the business success formulas we've treated as gospel. He is categorical: legacy large corporations, bound by massive and complex organizational structures built up over decades, will find themselves immobilized by their own size and face serious crisis. Meanwhile, small businesses and individual entrepreneurs — nimble and capable of rapid decision-making — are arriving at the greatest opportunity in history.
This article uses Schmidt's words as a compass, unpacking what "the AI agent era" specifically means. Then it lays out concrete strategies and an action plan for Japanese small businesses in particular to seize this historic opportunity.
The Age of Agents Has Arrived
When Eric Schmidt says "AI is underestimated," he's not talking about mere improvements in computing power. What he sees is a qualitative transformation in what "intelligence" means — how AI changes its fundamental role. The three technical breakthroughs he described at the TED conference in April 2025 are the key to understanding the coming "age of agents."
The first is "infinite context windows." The volume of information AI can process at once has grown dramatically. Older models were limited to thousands of words; the latest models can read millions — entire novels or complete project archives — and reason with full contextual understanding. AI can now make more accurate judgments against a broad knowledge background, the way humans do.
The second, and most important, is the emergence of "AI agents." Schmidt described this as "an army of experts." This is fundamentally different from AI that merely answers questions. Given a clear goal, an AI agent can form its own plan to achieve it, research information, connect tools, and execute tasks through to completion. For example: tell an agent to "run an influencer marketing campaign to raise awareness of our product," and it starts by listing influencers who resonate with the product's target audience on social media, then analyzes past engagement rates and follower profiles. It automatically reaches out to the most promising candidates and begins negotiations. Once a contract is secured, it drafts campaign content, gets your approval, and requests posting. It then tracks post-performance in real time and auto-generates a detailed report. Human involvement in this entire chain is limited to the critical decision points. This is no longer an "assistant" — it's an autonomous "project manager" and the "executor" of the work itself.
The third revolution is "text to action." This is the force that eliminates every barrier between idea and execution. It refers to AI's ability to take a natural-language instruction and automatically produce the concrete actions to fulfill it — writing software code, deploying to systems, and running the result. Just as Schmidt says "tell it to create software that automates this process and it will build it," even people with no programming knowledge can generate complex applications with words alone.
AI with deep comprehension from "infinite context windows," acting autonomously as an "agent," and instantly materializing ideas through "text to action." When these three revolutions converge, AI moves far beyond "replacing human work" — it becomes an unstoppable force that replaces entire business workflows wholesale.
Schmidt's statement at a November 2025 forum — "within the next one to two years, everyone will be building agents and competing" — reflects the confidence that this technical foundation is now in place. Already, not just OpenAI and Google but startups around the world are racing to develop task-specific agents. The "agent wars" are no longer a future prediction — the starting gun is ready to fire.
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The Collapse of Large Corporations and the Labor Paradigm Shift
The rise of AI agents isn't a benign story of better productivity tools. It's the beginning of a disruptive paradigm shift that shakes the very foundations of how organizations are structured and what "labor" means. Large corporations — the economic protagonists of the past — face the greatest risk of being swallowed by this transformation, precisely because of their size.
Why are once-formidable large corporations now at risk? Ironically, the answer lies in the massive, complex organizational structures they spent decades building as symbols of their success. Departments fragmented by function, approval processes layered in deep hierarchies, and invisible walls — "silos" — blocking inter-departmental coordination. Daily work is often consumed not by actual value creation but by "work about work": endless meetings, report writing, waiting for approvals, managing competing departmental interests.
But AI agents destroy these inefficient human-driven workflows with surgical precision and without mercy. Agent clusters with expertise in each department coordinate autonomously through APIs — running market research, generating ad creative, performing legal review, executing budgets, and measuring results — while the human simply clicks a final strategic approval button. Faced with this overwhelming speed, the near-zero labor cost, and round-the-clock efficiency, legacy organizations dependent on human coordination work will no longer even be standing on the same competitive field.
And on the other side of this transformation is Schmidt's most important insight: "the winners own the labor." Since the Industrial Revolution, ownership of "means of production" — factories and machines — was the source of wealth. In the AI agent era, the source of value shifts from physical production assets to the "intellectual labor force of AI agents" that execute tasks. Companies that develop superior AI agents and own and provide this "labor" will hold overwhelming dominance across industries. This is the dawn of a completely new business model following SaaS: "Labor as a Service."
Companies that can't shift to AI-native thinking and cling to existing organizational structures and business processes will accumulate a massive "invisible debt" — one that doesn't appear on the balance sheet but steadily corrodes the business. Specifically: the debt of an organizational culture resistant to change, the technical debt of legacy systems, and the structural debt of inefficient workflows. Just as the dinosaurs couldn't adapt to the ice age and went extinct, the collapse of large corporations may be an unavoidable future.
The "Greatest Opportunity in History" for Small Businesses and Individuals
The twilight of large corporations signals the dawn for new players. The future Schmidt describes isn't dystopia — it's the arrival of a democratic and exciting era where old authority and capital size lose their meaning. For small businesses and individual entrepreneurs who can move quickly without being trapped by fixed assumptions, AI agents become a game-changer that brings "the greatest opportunity in history."
The "one-person billion-dollar company" — foreseen by OpenAI's Sam Altman — is becoming plausible. This isn't hyperbole. Traditionally, enormous value creation required many employees, offices, and capital. In the AI agent era, those prerequisites are overturned. An entrepreneur with a clear vision can lead an "army of AI agents" to run businesses that once only large organizations could manage. From marketing to legal, every corporate function can be replaced or automated by AI agents, compressing fixed costs to a minimum.
Where exactly does this historic opportunity lie? Here are three promising areas worth considering.
The first is "developing and selling niche-specialized agents." General-purpose AI is powerful, but real value lives in specialization. An agent that deeply understands the complex regulations and specialized workflows of a specific industry creates overwhelming added value. For example: an agent that flawlessly handles Japan's complex real estate registration procedures. Or one that fully automates medical institution billing. Or one that completes patent research in minutes from vast literature and case law databases. By focusing on such niche domains, even individuals and small businesses with limited capital can potentially dominate high-margin markets that large players struggle to enter.
The second is "delivering advanced services through AI agents." This is a new way of working that might be called "AI producer." Orchestrate multiple specialized agents — research, data analysis, strategy, creative — the way a film director coordinates actors and crew, to address a client's challenges. Services that used to require top-tier consulting firms spending large sums over long periods of time can now be delivered by individuals at remarkably low cost and speed.
The third is "'agentizing' your existing business." This is arguably the most accessible and highest-impact opportunity for every business operator. Thoroughly audit your company's daily business processes, identify what AI agents can automate and optimize, and rebuild the business model itself.
Start with routine tasks, accumulate small wins, and gradually extend into areas involving more complex decisions. Reinvest the time and resources freed by "agentization" into genuinely creative activities or building deeper customer relationships — the kinds of value creation only humans can do. This is the source of sustainable competitive advantage in the AI era.
Three Actions You Can Take Right Now
To seize this once-in-a-generation opportunity, we need to act now.
First, play with AI relentlessly. Start by using cutting-edge AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude every day — not just for work but in your personal life too — to develop a feel for their remarkable capabilities and current limitations. Don't just know "what AI can do" as a piece of information; grasp "what you can do with AI" as a physical instinct.
Next, decompose your business processes. Write each of your business processes on sticky notes — or whatever works — and make them fully visible. Find what takes the most time, what's simple and repetitive, and what has clear judgment criteria. That's where AI agent adoption starts.
Finally, start before you're ready. There's no need to aim for company-wide DX from day one. Even something as small as automating first-response emails to customer inquiries is a meaningful start. The small wins and the learnings you accumulate become invaluable know-how that no competitor can replicate.
TIMEWELL's WARP program walks alongside businesses in strategy planning and execution for exactly this kind of agentization and AI adoption. Former DX and data strategy specialists from major enterprises provide support from AI deployment design through to implementation on a monthly basis. Even if you're not sure where to begin, you can start by mapping out your business processes together.
Don't Be a Spectator of History. Become Its Next Winner.
Schmidt's words present us with a clear choice. The emergence of AI agents is an irreversible, massive shift comparable to — or surpassing — the Industrial Revolution. Faced with this change, will you watch it as a threat, or ride it as an opportunity? That choice will dramatically diverge the futures of individuals and companies over the next few years.
For Japanese small businesses in particular, this is exactly a tailwind. The "baggage" that large corporations carry — entrenched by past success and encumbered by organizations of tens of thousands of employees — becomes a heavy anchor preventing course correction in this period of rapid change. Meanwhile, we're in the ideal position to build AI-native business models from scratch, faster than anyone, with our agility as our greatest weapon.
If you've read this far, you can't afford to remain a spectator. History has always been made by those who faced change without fear, took risks, and took action. Now is the time to lead AI agents of your own and take the first step toward becoming the next winner.
References
- Transcript of The AI Revolution Is Underhyped: Eric Schmidt (SingjuPost, May 17, 2025). https://singjupost.com/transcript-of-the-ai-revolution-is-underhyped-eric-schmidt/
- Former Google CEO predicts AI will replace most programmers in a year (san.com, Apr 22, 2025). https://san.com/cc/former-google-ceo-predicts-ai-will-replace-most-programmers-in-a-year/
- Coinbase's 24/5 Trading Push is Really a Bet on Agentic AI (Yahoo Finance, Feb 25, 2026). https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coinbase-24-5-trading-push-221750080.html
- All of My Employees Are AI Agents, and So Are My Executives (WIRED, Nov 12, 2025). https://www.wired.com/story/all-my-employees-are-ai-agents-so-are-my-executives/