I’m sure they’ll be critical in the sense that they’ll be heavily involved and the system set up to rely on them. I’m not so sure they’ll be critical in the sense that they substantially improve the process compared to today.

Consider computers in education. Education has been trying to cram “technology” into the process for decades. Every student in my kid’s elementary school has a laptop. It’s critical to education today. But is it actually improving education? I don’t see any indication of that. As far as I can see, everyone decided that computers were important to have in education, so they made it happen, without ever checking to see if it actually helped.