If you were born in the pre-internet era, you’ll surely have experienced that uncomfortable moment when a digital-native youngster looks at you strangely and wonders why you couldn’t have just gone online and looked for what you wanted when you were little. Quite as if it were entirely our fault for not having a handy internet-like thing around. Imagine what it will be like for those growing up with agents around to do their bidding.
With another intelligence now occupying the space between intention and outcome, how will agentic-natives develop personal accountability and agency?
At the beginning of 2026, it was hard to imagine what the year of AI agents would actually mean. We’re not done with the year yet, but anyone who doesn’t just brush past technology will have a pretty good idea of what agentic AI is about. Before one could think of opting out, agentic capabilities slipped into the apps we regularly use—browsers, email, office applications, search and the chat assistants we’re getting accustomed to.
Leaving it to the agent
Now the agents can handle our email, make travel plans, track agendas, replenish supplies, do useless shopping, and execute projects. To us, it’s new, more than a little scary, and also fascinating. Having handled responsibilities for all of our lives, we don’t mind giving some of the work over to AI agents. But the next generation of kids could take agents for granted.
It’s far too early to say and, of course, we have no longitudinal studies since agentic AI is spanking new, but it’s still the right time to conjecture and plan for a time when agents seem as if they were always there. Leaving aside, for now, the possibility that AI agents can go rogue and cause all manner of messes, let’s assume someone sorts that out and they live alongside us, doing all the tedious, time-consuming, attention-hogging things we would rather not do. But what if those tedious tasks help us become autonomous adults?
Children grow to learn about personal accountability by being taught that if they do a certain thing, it will lead to a certain consequence. And they go on to make choices and deal with the results. If a child is given pocket money and spends it all on video games, the consequence may be that there’s nothing left to spend on eats. And that’s something the child will need to cope with until the next pay check.
When an AI agent is added to the mix, it may warn the child that there won’t be enough money left, suggest spending less, or eventually know enough about the child’s needs to prevent the mistake in the first place. Helpful, certainly. But the child has also lost a small opportunity to make a decision, experience its consequence and learn from it.
Learning consequences
Life is filled with daily decisions and their consequences. And everyday mistakes are how children develop judgement. If AI agents simply take over these tasks, interacting with other agents and getting things done, where will children get the chance to develop critical decision making, choosing, acting and taking responsibility for the consequences?
If agents are going to be a permanent feature of childhood for the next generation rather than a novelty that today’s adults bolt on later, the burden shifts to the design table.
An agent that treats every user identically—adult, teenager, ten-year-old—will optimize for the same thing in all three cases: the best outcome at the least friction. That would be the wrong goal for a child.
It needn’t become like a parental filter, but it could recognise when a task is actually a rehearsal for judgement about money, time, a promise made to a friend, and hold back on the fix.
For instance, the agent could wait till the pocket money is spent on the video games and then help the child think through what happened. It’s harder to design than an agent which is just always helpful by default, but could well be worth it.
The New Normal: The world is at an inflexion point. Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to be as massive a revolution as the Internet has been. The option to just stay away from AI will not be available to most people, as all the tech we use takes the AI route. This column series introduces AI to the non-techie in an easy and relatable way, aiming to demystify and help a user to actually put the technology to good use in everyday life.
Mala Bhargava is most often described as a ‘veteran’ writer who has contributed to several publications in India since 1995. Her domain is personal tech, and she writes to simplify and demystify technology for a non-techie audience.