Member-only story
Why AI Agents Will Take Way Longer Than We Thought
Three months ago I published my annual predictions, and while I rarely revisit them in the middle of the year, I do want to note an interesting development related to prediction #3, which states: “2025 will not be the year AI agents take off.”
Here’s what I said back in January:
“As the bloom came off the Generative AI rose in 2024, everyone started talking about AI agents as the Next Big Thing. Google, Apple, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon — all of them (and about a million startups) are trying to build user agents for both enterprise and consumer use cases. I’m a huge fan of the concept, but for now, it remains just that. Reasoning agents that book your travel, negotiate your insurance bills, or manage your calendar simply will not work if they are beholden to the same business models currently driving Big Tech. There’s so, so much to say about why this is true, but I’ll leave that for another series of posts.”
Indeed, there is a lot to say. I’ve struggled with how to cover this without getting stuck in the messy details of an emerging industry, and for the most part, I’ve just stayed silent. But this piece in The Information — Anthropic’s Not-So-Secret Weapon That’s Giving Agents a Boost — is spurring me to clear my throat.
