Most "AI Agents" Still Can't Do the One Thing They Promise
Autonomy is the pitch. Reliability is the problem. A field report from someone who actually deployed one.
Every demo of an AI agent looks like magic. Every production agent I have actually run looks like an intern who is brilliant for ten minutes and then quietly renames your files.
The gap is memory and guardrails. A chatbot answers a question. An agent is supposed to do a thing, check the thing, and recover when the thing breaks. Most of them are bad at the recovery part.
I gave one agent a simple task: check three dashboards, summarize, post to Slack. It nailed it twice. The third time it posted a half-finished draft at 3am because a dashboard was slow and it guessed.
The vendors will tell you the models are improving fast, and they are. But "improving" and "trustworthy enough to run unsupervised" are different bars, and we are not at the second one yet.
My advice, boring as it is: keep a human in the loop for anything that touches money, a customer, or your reputation. Agents are great copilots. They are not yet pilots.