Are AI agents a big deal? Or just bots in formal wear?

Last year, Salesforce and Hubspot announced that they were all on AI agents. Salesforce, CEO Marc Benioff, said the company is doing a “hard beer” and will be 100% regarding its Agentfa platform.

“[Agentforce] It is the third wave of Ai-participation outside Copilots to the new era of high-accurate intelligent agents with low hallucinations who actively run customers’ success, ”he said last September.

What are the agents?

Here is what marketing materials say: Agents are AI who use tools to achieve goals. These are intelligent systems that perform tasks without human intervention. Agents are characterized by their ability to function separately, decide and act.

“Agents are nothing new,” said Christopher Penn, co -founder and main scientist.

“[Agents] They are not really agents, ”said Paul Roetzer, CEO of the AI ​​Marketing Institute.

Application with your own drive

So, what are they?

Penn sees them as an application with their own drive. “They have a language model (LLM) built in part of them, plus some infrastructure around them that allows them to run on a certain schedule or have more than one tandem language model,” he said.

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Roetzer thinks it gives them too much credit.

“They just changed the name of the robots,” Roetzer said. The agents were supposed to be much more impressive than what we have now.

“We have been promised to use your computer smoothly, performing tasks such as completing forms and reservation of travel with access to your accounts,” he said.

For Roetzer, the current reality is such that although they use LLM in their processes, they lack complex abilities that would distinguish them from robots.

Let’s call it the agent

“Because LLM is used in the process, because AI is used in steps, it is as if everyone just became okay and called it an Ai agent,” he said.

Penn basically agrees. He said agents are applications with built -in LLM and infrastructure that allows them to run on a particular plan and then hand over the product to another application that does something with it. Adding LLM is an interesting addition to existing technology. “But that’s not new. Zapier as a company basically has agents ”for about decades.

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“Microsoft autogen is an agent that allows you to let one model write something,” he said, “and then the second model in this controlled sequence corrects and says you haven’t followed the task.”

These objections do not mean that these “agents” are not incredibly useful. As Penn emphasizes, these things are strong and simple in what you can do with them. As a result they have seemingly
An infinite number of cases of use. ”

“I suspect that a very expensive consultant wanted to raise his billing rate somewhere and came up with the agent artificial intelligence, unlike applications,” he said.

How to recognize a real agent

You will know the real agent because he will not need human interaction.

“But in the foreseeable future, one is likely to get stronger in most agents’ applications,” Roetzer said. “This year seems to be many people who make a lot of agents who are basically a bunch of if/then orders that were crushed along with some LLM

To be clear, real autonomous agents come. Improved thinking abilities eventually let Ai pass through a chain of thinking. This and improved multimodal models that can produce text, pictures, video and sound means that agents will eventually be more than we were originally promised.