Who's Managing the Agents? | Jake Mannix, Walmart Global Tech

What happens to human work when AI agents can do most of it? From agent governance to model personality to generational adoption, the conversation around artificial intelligence is no longer just about what agents can do. It is about what humans become in a world where they manage them. In the second episode of Choose Your Stack, recorded at the MCP Dev Summit in New York City, Ryo Koyama sits down with Jake Mannix, Technical Fellow, AI, Relevance, and Agentic Governance at Walmart, the world’s largest private employer, to explore what the agentic era actually looks like at enterprise scale. Jake breaks down why the future of work is not humans versus agents but humans learning to manage them, why enterprises will use many specialized models rather than one universal AI, and whether large language models actually have an inner life and what that means for how we build with them. 0:00 Intro 0:20 Jake’s role at Walmart 2:33 Should you treat AI agents like they have feelings? 4:27 How to manage agents effectively 5:04 LLM Culture wars 6:22 Why enterprises need many specialized models not one universal AI 8:20 How fast are open source models closing the gap? 10:14 What skills will matter most in the AI era? 13:36 Do LLMs actually have a first-person experience? 14:25 Is AI bigger than the internet?