Digital Spirits

Can AI agents solve our digital interoperability problem?

At January’s Consumer Electronics Show, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang boldly proclaimed, “the Age of AI agentics is here.” Just days before, OpenAI’s Sam Altman echoed the chipmaker, blogging “We [OpenAI] believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies.” AI agents are back in vogue.

For the non-technical, “agents” or “agentic AI” refers to AI equipped with not only intelligence, but the ability to autonomously solve complex, multi-step problems. In short, very smart bots.

For years there have been attempts to create workable agents, yet hype has always outpaced reality. Following the release of ChatGPT came a boom of excitement, yielding frameworks like babyAGI, which were unreliable and used tech that failed often. Today, products, such as Salesforce’s Agentforce and Google’s Agentspace, offer modest improvements enabling agents to field customer service queries and automate business tasks. Still, they only work in highly structured environments and are limited to preapproved tasks.