EP 582: No, that’s not an AI Agent. Cutting through the Agentic AI marketing hype
🎯 Summary
Podcast Summary: EP 582: No, that’s not an AI Agent. Cutting through the Agentic AI marketing hype
This episode of the Everyday AI Show is a “Hot Take Tuesday” dedicated to debunking the massive marketing hype surrounding “AI Agents.” The host argues that the vast majority of products currently branded as AI agents are, in reality, just rebranded chatbots or pre-built marketing automation workflows with a superficial layer of AI.
1. Focus Area
The primary focus is Agentic AI Hype vs. Reality. The discussion centers on defining what constitutes a true AI Agent versus what is being deceptively marketed as one (a phenomenon the host calls “agent washing” or “the over-agentification of everything”). It also covers the implications of this marketing deception on business investment and project success rates.
2. Key Technical Insights
- True Agent Definition: A genuine AI Agent is defined as an AI that is given a goal/end destination and the necessary tools/information, and then autonomously builds its own solution path without relying on pre-built decision trees or workflows.
- Required Capabilities: A useful, true agent must have access to tools equivalent to a human worker, such as a virtual browser, virtual desktop, or command-line tools (like Terminal), allowing it to adapt and interact with the real world.
- Agentic vs. Agent: There is a critical distinction between agentic AI (referring to the underlying models, like GPT-4o or Gemini 1.5 Pro, which possess advanced reasoning) and an actual Agent (a complete system capable of autonomous, multi-step planning and execution).
3. Business/Investment Angle
- Market Deception: The host claims this marketing trend is the “biggest tech marketing scam since the dot-com bubble,” citing a Gartner study revealing that over 95% (130 out of 3,000+) vendors claiming to offer AI agents do not actually possess true agent capabilities.
- Investment Risk: Businesses investing in these non-agent solutions are building on “shaky ground.” Gartner predicts over 40% of current agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 due to using inadequate technology or being based on these false premises.
- Strategic Guidance: Decision-makers should be cautious about relying on startups in this space. The host advises that successful enterprise adoption of true agents in the near future will likely be centered around the offerings of the Big Five major tech players (OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and potentially Anthropic).
4. Notable Companies/People
- Gartner: Their research is central to the episode, exposing the massive discrepancy between agent marketing claims and technical reality.
- The “Big Five”: OpenAI, Microsoft (Copilot Studio), Google (Agent Space/Project Mayari), Meta, and Anthropic are identified as the players most likely to deliver viable, general-purpose agents that enterprises should focus on.
- Windsor (Cautionary Tale): Mentioned as an example of a promising startup (in the vibe coding space) that ultimately dissolved after its leadership was acquired, illustrating the risk of building critical processes on smaller, non-trillion-dollar market cap companies.
5. Future Implications
The industry is heading toward a future where true agents will handle significant operational load. Gartner predicts that by 2028, over 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made by autonomous agentic AI, and more than a third of enterprise software applications will embed generative AI. However, the current hype cycle is delaying this progress, leading to widespread disappointment and skepticism among businesses that invest in false solutions.
6. Target Audience
This episode is highly valuable for AI/Tech Professionals, Business Leaders, Enterprise Decision-Makers, and Investors who are actively evaluating or investing in AI automation solutions and need a clear, technical framework to differentiate genuine agent technology from marketing fluff.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
💬 Key Insights
"The most valuable skill for the next decade will be 'AI Orchestration'—the ability to sequence, manage, and verify outputs from multiple specialized AI services."
"If you are building an AI company today, you must have a clear, defensible answer to: 'What happens when the foundation model provider changes their API tomorrow?'"
"The biggest competitive moat in five years won't be the model weights; it will be the proprietary, high-quality feedback loops you build into your deployment environment."
"real agents have advanced reasoning. They can plan multiple steps ahead independently without human guidance. True agents don't need workflows built for them. What they need, they need memory systems that learn and can remember context across long conversations and tasks, and true agents integrate with the tools and systems to take actions in the real world."
"number one, there's no definition. There's no one agreed-upon definition of what an AI agent actually is, and that's problematic, right?"
"if there's not a trillion-dollar market cap in the company that you're building your AI agents on, you're probably in the wrong place, right? And I'd say the only exceptions to that rule would be OpenAI and Anthropic, right? So it's like, all right, you should probably be building on Microsoft, Google, Meta."