Hardly a day goes by at the moment without one company or another releasing a new AI agent system. Microsoft with Magentic-One and agents in Microsoft 365, Google Jarvis, OpenAI with its upcoming Operator and even the cautious Anthropic, have released or announced agent products over the past few weeks.
It looks as though the world is about to face a deluge of AI agent systems over the coming two years, all vying to take over your everyday digital life.
What are AI agents?
If your idea of an agent involves things like dry Martinis and fast cars, you’re in for a surprise. Agents in the AI sense, are software routines that use artificial intelligence to scurry around and accomplish specific goals.
They do this by splitting these goals into smaller tasks, using whatever resources and other AI agents they need, in order to monitor progress and complete the objective.
Think of it like a group of very intelligent friends who get together to plan a fishing trip, led by their bossy friend — the Ferris Bueller — who coordinates them all, and makes sure that nobody goes off track at any time.
Now you may ask, as some people do, why use agents when a standard AI model can easily do a lot of this drudge work itself? And that's a very good question.
The fact is, while AI models are incredibly efficient at doing single tasks, they are not designed to do multiple things in a chain. Sure they can do complex work, if they're trained properly and given the right prompt. But they have their limits.
Are people ready for AI agents?
Over 200 million users a week deploy ChatGPT for one task or another. But there's a huge difference between using and...well using. Looking at the numbers, it seems that most Jo Citizens are using AI as simple shortcuts in their work, almost like a glorified search engine, while the rest are enjoying a nice chat.
Apart from spammers and scammers very few people seem to be using AI as a fully-fledged replacement for anything serious. Students use it to create essay outlines, and office drones summarize data, or 'delve' into banal snippets of marketing fluff. But nobody is sitting back, pressing an AI button and saying 'off you go'.
There’s always a human hovering around very close by, to make sure it’s all working like it should be, and let’s not talk about the horrors of hallucinations.
Despite all the hype, the AI sector is still waiting for its killer application, the product that transforms a technology into a household tool, like spreadsheets and word-processing software did for business users around the globe decades ago. For the majority of us asking for a cheesecake recipe, it's hardly a revolution. Yet.
AI agents just 'get on with it'
Of course when AI shines, it really does bring a smile to the face. Specialist applications for professional users like programmers, medical researchers and financial analysts are showing just how powerful it can be to have a computer crunching data at unimaginable speed.
So all this marketing noise around the newly arrived Agentic systems may be masking something a little bit deeper. The fact is, the pace of basic foundational AI development seems to have slowed up considerably. New model releases with incremental improvements are being trickled out, rather than the firehose we’re used to.
What is it that agents add that is so extra special? The reality is, in their present incarnation, they don't actually add that much to the mix. Sure they can make pretty charts, research the web and order a pizza, all while doing some clever math. But those are things that any AI model can do, and agents don’t necessarily do them any better.
In fact if you look at a current sample list of agents, and what they're capable of right now, you're likely to see the same old, ‘summarize a piece of text or transcribe a YouTube video or conduct an SEO audit on a website’, kind of stuff, which AI models have been doing for months, if not years. Basically software automation on steroids.
What comes next?
Where things get interesting is when we start to look forward a little bit, to a time when there are other technologies in place which give agents the powers they need to differentiate themselves from 'dumb' AI models.
One such example is Pin AI, not to be confused with Humane's troubled AI Pin. Pin AI, co-founded by ex-google DeepBrain alumni Bill Sun, is an agentic system which goes beyond simple goals and tasks, and implements a full ecosystem capable of accomplishing complex and sophisticated routines.
At the heart of any truly revolutionary agentic system of the future, there will have to be some way of ensuring secure, private and trustworthy transactions out in the real world, without having to rely on human interaction. This is something that current AI models or agentic systems simply cannot do.
This, and so much more, is the true future of empowered AI agents. Agents with full autonomy and the ability to connect with everything the real world has to offer.
Pin AI intends to address that problem by integrating AI with the blockchain, third party payment systems and composable smart contracts, which together will be able to accomplish a good percentage of the real-world transactions we humans need to do every day. If it comes off, it has the potential to truly revolutionize the way we do everyday tasks.
So, instead of sending an AI agent off to just book us a cheap vacation trip on the web, we’ll be able to ask an AI app to do the research on everything from cab fares to the airport, flights, hotels and holiday insurance.
It will then use our trusted blockchain tokens to negotiate, book and manage our whole itinerary for the trip. Including booking and paying for a nice set of vacation activities based on our past history and known likes. Oh and hire the best tour guide on the island for the duration.
This, and so much more, is the true future of empowered AI agents. Agents with full autonomy and the ability to connect with everything the real world has to offer.
But for now, we’ll have to wait patiently while the early adopters and enthusiasts work out the bugs and wrinkles of these fledgling systems, getting it all ready for prime time.
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