Sber launches GigaCowork to replace Russian bureaucrats with AI agents

At the CIPR conference in Nizhny Novgorod, Sber's subsidiary Salute for Business rolled out GigaCowork, a platform designed to let non-technical managers build and deploy AI agents. The big selling point is that corporate workers can configure these digital helpers through a simple chat interface using plain text instructions, checklists, or standard company regulations.

Instead of writing code, employees just explain what they want the AI to do, and the system turns these instructions into "skills" that can be shared across departments. The platform aims to tackle the issue of isolated automation, where an AI might do one tiny task, but human workers still have to spend hours manually copying and pasting data between systems before and after.

The promotional figures presented by Andrey Belevtsev are, expectedly, massive. Sber claims that early tests showed a 30% to 50% reduction in research time, while document processing allegedly accelerated by 80%. Even more shocking is the claim that candidate search speeds up by 93%, leaving human HR specialists with absolutely nothing to do except perhaps contemplate their life choices.

According to Vladimir Tolmachev, the system is built on the premise that the AI acts merely as an assistant, leaving the final decision-making to a human. This is probably a very wise safety net, considering how creative LLMs can get when calculating project budgets or assessing financial risks based on corporate databases.

In the end, it seems the grand dream of Russian corporate tech is to build a massive digital bureaucracy to manage the physical one. While the numbers on paper look like a fantasy cooked up in a marketing department, the reality of untrained managers instructing AI agents to run risk assessments is bound to produce some spectacular corporate drama.