A quirk of cooking culture in America is that there exists a whole category of recipe that has only one instruction: 'just add water.'
This is exactly what I was after when I eagerly promised pancakes to my four nieces and two children during a recent visit to see family. My usual pancake recipe (the from-scratch kind) wasn’t going to cut it. I needed something efficient and easy. The grocery store in Coastal North Carolina delivered with shelves packed with pancake mixes galore, all promising the fastest, fluffiest pancakes straight from a box mix combined with water.
I stood before the shelves, both captivated and intimidated by the range of choice. I found the most wholesome-looking buttermilk pancake box mix, and flipped it around, and read the instructions: ‘Whisk together mix and water. Heat griddle. Pour batter onto griddle.’ It looked good enough. Then my eyes wandered down to the ‘Baker’s Tip’ at bottom: ‘For a richer pancake, combine 2 cups dry mix with 1 egg, 1 cup milk, and ¼ cup oil instead of water.’ Those were the instructions I followed with gusto (who wouldn’t want richer pancakes?), and the pancakes were devoured faster than it took me to make them.
When my daughter asked me if I’d made them, I didn’t quite understand the question. ‘But did you make them?’ she asked me again, probing. When I held up the bag and told her that I’d made them from a mix, her expression was one of disappointment, which left me perplexed until I was back at work two weeks later.
As an all-too-busy mother of two small children and full-time Director of our Auckland business, time is my most coveted commodity. I felt this acutely two weeks after the pancake episode during a workshop run by our design team about AI-augmented life. Weaving AI into my daily routine is something I think about with skepticism and a touch of curiosity: What if an AI agent could give me not just more time, but better time? How much of my daily tasks and interactions would I be willing to give up in return for more time for the interactions that give my life meaning?
That’s when I think about Betty Crocker.
Betty Crocker is the fictional persona of the General Mills Company, best known for her cake-in-a-box kits that were developed in 1947 to help busy mid-century housewives. The 1940s and 1950s were a transformative era of domestic innovation: washing machines, tupperware, frost-free refrigerators, the microwave oven… and Betty Crocker’s cake mix. The brand’s motto, ‘All good things start with Betty Crocker,’ embodied the promise of making life easier by replacing the tedium of measuring, sifting and scooping with the simple act of adding water to a mix. It wasn’t just a promise of efficiency, but a promise for more time.
Betty Crocker’s cake mix was a complete failure. Housewives rejected the mix because it was too easy; it didn’t feel homemade enough. ‘Just add water’ trivialised the labour of love that was at the heart of their baking. So General Mills made one simple change: they removed the egg powder from the mix so bakers had to add water and crack two eggs into the mix. With that small modification, Betty Crocker became a phenomenal and sustained success.
Agentic AI is technology’s Betty Crocker. It holds a promise to free us from the mundane so we can get to the sweeter moments of life faster. In a perfectly AI-augmented world, your agent of choice can get that client brief and that GP appointment booking done, giving you more time to ideate with your colleagues and get home sooner to cuddle your sick child. But these endlessly helpful agents don’t have boundaries; they are designed to prompt us back, asking us for permission to take things further. Through this repartee, AI does the doing and the thinking for us. It reduces friction so effectively that there is virtually no friction in the exchange… and if taken too far, in our lives.
What’s to stop our virtual proxy tasked with triaging calls from our elderly parents from becoming their GP? Or from becoming your child’s preferred bedtime reading companion? At what point does cracking an egg become just too hard, and we opt for ‘just add water’?
My daughter is a food snob (like her mother) and is accustomed to the from-scratch pancakes I’ve made her entire life. She delights in the process of weighing the flours, separating the eggs, whisking the whites into peaks, grating lemon zest, adding vanilla, smelling the batter as it cooks, and pouring rivers of maple syrup on top. My daughter’s question helped me understand the difference between making and making. The process of making pancakes together (though if I’m honest, it’s mostly her observing the making) is where the joy of having pancakes lies. The mix left her wanting because the moment of connection, the process we share every time we have pancakes, was gone. The output alone wasn’t enough.
I want to believe that we’ll opt for lived experience over a completely frictionless, AI-augmented life. Betty Crocker gives me that hope. Friction is essential to the human experience. Physiologically, our brains need cognitive friction to build the neural connections that keep this most wondrous organ of ours functioning. We need to experience the rigour of doing things that are a little bit challenging, even if it’s just pouring a measurement of water and cracking an egg into a pre-made cake mix. As a species, we’re constantly negotiating (consciously or not) between making things easier and making things meaningful. It’s not just about getting the cake made, it’s about the effort and the care that went into making it.
We’re living in a remarkable moment in human history where technology can enable us not only to survive, but to flourish. But ultimately, technology is simply that: an enabler. Lived experience makes us human. So in facing an agentic future, I challenge us to remember Betty Crocker. What ingredients can be taken out of the mix to make our lives easier? And what ingredients do we need to retain to connect to people and the planet around us?
I don't have the answer. None of us do. But what I do think is that agentic AI can only go so far before we humans reject it in favour of doing things ourselves. The ‘doing’ matters.
When used as a tool, AI can bring efficiency and efficacy to tasks that are otherwise time-consuming and mundane. It will invariably become an essential, taken-for-granted part of our lives, like the microwave oven and washing machine. But sometimes, that won’t be enough; we’ll need to do, make, or experience something directly. That’s what we’ll come to call the ‘Betty Crocker moment’: where we just need to crack the egg ourselves.