When Will AGI Happen?

From hype to signal: where to look

1) Frontier‑lab guidance
Major labs are publishing more on how they intend to progress, what they’re testing, and how they think about readiness. Watch for statements about responsible paths, evaluation plans, and safety “gates” for new capabilities.

2) Forecasts & benchmarks
Crowd forecasts and expert summaries won’t give you an exact date—but they do capture rate of change. A drift from “mid‑century” to “this decade” in credible venues is a signal to accelerate adoption planning.

3) Leadership expectations
When industry leaders put a date stake in the ground (e.g., “around 2030”), treat it less as prophecy and more as planning guidance: a window in which supply chains, compliance, and talent pipelines should be adapted.

4) Capability frameworks
Use structured levels of AGI/agent capability to understand what’s missing between your current copilots and reliably autonomous systems. This guides procurement and internal R&D.

What changes first for teams

• Workflows compress. Multi‑step tasks (triage → research → draft → verify → action) converge into one agentic loop, with evidence attached.
• Roles shift. Specialists move up the stack (policy, oversight, quality) while agents handle the repetitive, rule‑heavy work.
• Governance matters earlier. Consent, provenance, and evaluation pipelines become part of “shipping.”

A pragmatic timeline

• 0–12 months: Narrow agents reliably automate chunks of legal ops, support, procurement, sales ops—with guardrails (identity, consent, citations).
• 12–24 months: Identity/consent/provenance standardize. Agents speak to SaaS and data safely; KPI baselines emerge (“factuality with sources,” “authorized actions”).
• 24–60 months: Multi‑day planning and resilient autonomy for complex processes. Many will call this “practical AGI.”

This isn’t a promise; it’s a deployment‑oriented projection from observable trends. The riskiest move is waiting for a “true AGI” announcement before modernizing workflows.

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