As artificial intelligence (AI) agents move into our smartphones and personal computers (PCs), we have become people with talented digital assistants. While conventional voice assistants such as Apple's "Siri" merely received commands and carried them out, AI agents understand context and proactively suggest and execute the next action. This is a significant change that transforms our PCs and smartphones from simple tools into diligent and capable workers. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who recently visited Korea, also offered a forecast that "inference demand arising from the emergence of AI agents is expected to generate revenue reaching about 1,500 trillion won."
A representative effect of using AI agents is productivity innovation. They read and summarize emails and write replies on your behalf. They can automatically coordinate meeting schedules and suggest the most appropriate time, even taking into account the other party's preferred times. After a video conference, they immediately summarize and share the contents of the meeting. They allow tasks such as reservations, payments, and document creation—which users had to handle while moving back and forth across multiple websites—to be processed with a single command.
AI agents also have a wide range of applications in daily life. They analyze a user's spending patterns and budget, automatically categorize expenditures, and suggest ways to save. They can recommend optimal plans for investments such as deposits, savings, bonds, and stocks, and going one step further, if given permission, they can serve as a financial assistant that handles the investing itself. In shopping, they compare countless products and recommend items that match the consumer's tastes by combining price, product reviews, and delivery conditions. In travel planning, they comprehensively design recommendations for the best flights, hotels, and restaurants, serving as a personalized travel planner and guide.
For those engaged in learning, creation, and research, AI agents can serve as an extended brain. As those who have long used ChatGPT or Claude will agree, they learn a user's writing characteristics to draft reports and automatically create presentation materials. The more you use them, the more one cannot help but be amazed at how they increasingly resemble the user's own writing. They also summarize countless papers, organize key concepts, and remember a developer's coding patterns to generate customized code.
In the area of health management, AI agents can be used as systems that link with smartwatches to analyze activity data such as heart rate, sleep, and exercise, and track long-term health patterns. As data accumulates, it may become possible to combine past medical history, exercise levels, and dietary habits to warn of disease risks at an early stage. Beyond medication reminders, they can interpret changes in health data to serve a supplementary diagnostic role and advise whether hospital treatment is necessary.
AI agents are becoming integrated platforms that connect an individual's work, consumption, health, and learning activities into a single flow, as well as AI partners that understand a user's intentions and carry them out on their behalf. There are already a growing number of cases in which people who skillfully use AI agents launch one-person businesses. At the core of all these functions is "memory." For an AI agent to assist a user better, it must comprehensively learn a great deal of information, including emails, search history, location data, health data, and personal relationships. This is because it is a "the more, the better" structure, in which the more information—that is, data—it has about the user, the better it performs the work. However, as we are well aware, when information that had been scattered across different contexts is integrated into a single repository, convenience is maximized, but at the same time, security risks grow exponentially.
The hacking of even a single account alone could simultaneously expose sensitive information such as an individual's lifestyle patterns, workplace duties, detailed financial transaction histories, and medical consultation records. In addition, in a structure where AI sends emails and executes payments on a user's behalf, phishing attacks can become far more sophisticated. Attacks that deceive context-understanding AI also risk bypassing existing security systems. AI agents have already entered our daily lives and are developing at a rapid pace. Just as we pursue innovation, we must not neglect information security. Efforts at the social and national level are needed to ensure that people who are excluded from using AI agents for various reasons are not disadvantaged or left behind.
