Explanations
The rest of this site says how. These pages say why: what agents are changing about the work, what the evidence shows, and what it might mean for curation. They say where the evidence is thin.
| Page | Question it answers |
|---|---|
| How agents changed software development | What happened to developers' roles and processes in 2026, the jagged frontier, and which components to craft by hand versus generate |
| What other fields suggest about curation | What radiology and evidence synthesis show about second readers and the costs of human review, and what that might mean for biocuration |
A guide for discussion
These are questions GO curators and developers have raised about using AI, with the section that addresses each.
| Question | Where to read |
|---|---|
| Is adoption too slow or too fast? Expectations versus reality | Felt speed and measured speed differ; The jagged frontier |
| The developers' perspective | How roles change |
| Project management, information overload, multitasking | Supervision is tiring; What we do in practice |
| Are we more efficient? Can we do more with less? | Could it be much more efficient? |
| Is the code and data we produce of higher quality? | Craft the core, generate the periphery; Second eyes in curation |
| What does a human in the loop cost? Do experts have to be hypervigilant? | The costs of keeping a human in the loop |
| How do we spot the output most likely to be wrong? | Where to look |
| Can AI review AI? What benchmarks could we use? | AI reviewing AI; How to tell whether AI review works |
| How should skills development be coordinated? | Write your own skills; Writing and sharing skills on the GO AI Hub; Break work into skills |
| How do curators share use cases and workflows? | Practical starting points; GO AI Hub |
Talks
These pages build on talks given to the curation community since late 2025. Slides are on Zenodo.
- Staying in the Loop: A Biocurator's Guide to Agentic AI Developments. Biocuration 2026 virtual conference, February 2026. Slides.
- Challenges with deploying agentic AI for biomedical data integration and curation. AIBIO-UK, EMBL-EBI, February 2026. Slides.
- Using agentic AI to assign gene function across multiple genomes. ASBMB 2026, March 2026. Slides.
- Agentic AI and Biodata Resources: The need for action. Global Core Biodata Resource Forum, October 2025. Slides.
- How Agentic AI can help us in GO and Using Agentic AI to Review GO Standard Annotations. GO Consortium meeting, October 2025. Part 1, part 2.
- GO curators agent training, April 2026, the workshop described in the GO AI Hub case study. Materials.