Advice for animal advocacy orgs and job seekers in the age of agents 🦞🦞🦞

AI agents aren't coming — they're here, and they're already reshaping what it means to work in animal advocacy. In this post, I break down the last twelve months of AI breakthroughs, from Claude Code to OpenClaw, and argue that every advocacy organization should be racing to adopt these tools right now. Drawing on conversations from the Sentient Futures Summit in San Francisco, I introduce a framework for the two roles that will define advocacy organizations going forward: agent orchestrators, who can single-handedly automate the digital work of entire teams, and human interfaces, whose irreplaceable social skills become the true bottleneck to impact. I make the case that spending $20 a month on AI in 2026 is organizational malpractice, that young CS graduates are the movement's most undervalued resource, and that both small and large organizations need to rethink their structures before the pace of change leaves them behind. This is a prediction, a dare, and a practical guide — because every hour you spend deliberating is an hour your agents could have spent working for animals.

This audio version of Sandcastles is produced using an AI clone of Aidan's voice. Please forgive mispronunciations. Read the original on Substack.

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