AI agents can provide 'clairvoyance' into organizations by ingesting vast amounts of data, overcoming the human limitation of holding only 7±2 things in the mind.
Garry Tan explains that while humans are limited to 7±2 items in working memory, AI agents can ingest unlimited data to provide deep organizational insights, effectively giving leaders 'clairvoyance'. ✦ AI generated
Garry Tan · a16z Podcast · 2026-08-12 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 30:48
“So one of the things I'm really interested in is conflict.”
The world is basically built on things that are built around human beings and human beings can only keep seven plus or minus two things in their head at any given time. And you know, guess what? You plus an agent can keep basically three Harry Potter books in your head... it can actually look at the ground truth from the data, right? And it's like that, you know, that's clairvoyance, right?
verbatim transcript · starts at 30:48
30:36like someone two levels down in your organization, but it can actually look at the ground truth from the data, right? And it's like that, you know, that's clairvoyance, right? Like >> Yes. >> You I mean if you once you have that in your brain, like actually every business in the world is available for you to take their business. >> Yes. >> Yes. Yes. >> like the world is basically built on
31:01things that are built around human beings and human beings can only keep seven plus or minus two things in their head at any given time. >> And you know, guess what? You plus an agent can keep basically three Harry Potter books in your head. You can like rifle shot >> come. >> Yeah, I mean and more to come, right? Like this is as this is as bad there's
31:21so many cryptoisms that like applied like 10 times more to AI which is like this is the worst it will ever be actually. >> Yes. Yes. >> Um and so the whole world, like all business, all things that people rely on, government especially, uh is basically still built on a world that is predicated by human beings, limited human beings that can only keep seven plus or minus two things in their head.
31:46>> Yes. >> And it's not ready. Like it's not ready for the world where agents can think at the speed of light. Like you have unlimited amounts of it, like unlimited amounts of data. Um and then, you know, my hope is that like basically products are going to be 10 or 100 times better. Like they should be a thousand times better. >> Yes. >> Like services should be a thousand times
32:08better, right? Like >> Yes. >> you know, the invisible hand of capitalism at that point lies properly done, it's not about lowering the cost of something. It should actually be um creating these like sort of magical things that they I was like on Wall Street Journal podcast recently and the reporter like kept trying to like gotcha me. He kept saying like, are you you know, you guys in tech, are you trying