Josh Elman
Partner at a16z focused on consumer products, with a background building products at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and investing in consumer startups.
“We keep talking about agents being autonomous. Book me the trip. Make me the reservation. And I think as humans, we actually don't want to give away that sense of control. I think we actually want it to check in with us, but do all the groundwork. Save me all the time and come up with the best options and the right trade-offs, and now let me make the final decision.”
a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
Following a discussion of permissions and trust for personal agents, Elman argues full autonomy isn't what users want right now. An agent can still be very useful if it does the legwork and asks before acting.
Transcript
…agent should have access to my personal things and my personal communication channels, but not my work ones and not let those bleed. And so that idea of fences and permissions and more controlled permissions and better monitoring is really how we're going to have to build a lot more trust. Totally.
…give them laws and principles. And I think a similar thing may apply here, which is like, look, here's how to dial in your presumptuousness. And it's very qualitative. And the model will have to make a judgment call based on your qualitative sort of advice to it, just as an employee would have to.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of why the analogy is, you know, a fence for children, because in some ways, these agents, they're incredibly capable, but at the same time, they're kind of children sometimes and how they may behave and not know all the nuances of like, hey, is this a good idea or not? And they don't always have that logic. And the most important thing, I think we keep talking about agents being autonomous. Book me the trip. Make me the reservation. And I think as humans, we actually don't want to give away that sense of control. I think we actually want it to check in with us, but do all the groundwork. Save me all the time and coming up with the best options and the right trade-offs. And now let me make the final decision and also let me make sure I've qualified the final decision, the cost, anything else before my agent acts is, I think, a place. And maybe over time, we'll even learn to trust it. But I think right now we don't need to to still have a really, really effective agent.
Right. I mean, it's we're at like the 1990s of e-commerce, where I think the like last stat I read was in 1997 or so is 60 to 90% of individuals on the internet thought that putting your credit card online was a preposterous idea. And here we are today. It's just everyone's tossing their credit…
And I think what will eventually hit that in this era as well, but it's going to take a little bit of time.
I think there's like a stated versus revealed preferences thing here because I think in revealed preferences, consumers will share any amount of data for even the most trivial amount of upside. You know, like people have been connecting their cards, their credit cards and the bank accounts via…
More from a16z Podcast
