Era of Agents: What Is Coming

Hey, I kept being asked about the agent hype and I wanted to clarify it. Yes, there is a lot of hype around AI agents. But AI agents are not just hype. It’s a new form of software, and we have already entered the era of agents.

Right now we’re in phase one, where existing applications and devices are being patched with agentic experiences and agentic interfaces. They’re becoming more dynamic, proactive, autonomous in some cases. But the really exciting changes will happen in the next phase — what we call the “agentic zoo” at FrontSail AI. This is where a lot of small expert agents will be deployed in the wild: narrow-scoped agents capable of doing a task or a set of related tasks. There will be agents that are business assistants, agents representing a business, agents capable of completing taxes, buying a car, doing research, writing this website.

And our phones will become a kind of assistant interface that you can ask to complete a task, and it will collaborate with all these agents available in the wild and do the task on your behalf. For example, if I have a tree in my backyard and I’d like it pruned a bit, I could ask my phone to do it. My phone will contact some agent — for example, one representing Google Places — and find me local contractors capable of doing the job. Then my assistant will contact each of these contractors — ideally there’s an assistant representing each of them — and negotiate the price and the conditions of the deal. If it looks good enough, it will sign on my behalf and send me a confirmation: “Okay, the guy is coming tomorrow between 3:00 and 5:00 as you requested. All is good.”

But this change will be very slow — probably 5 to 10 years — because it will require a lot of infrastructure changes, and not just compute infrastructure, energy, and data centers. It will also require a lot of changes in society: legislation, terms and rules, security. For example, how do we make sure the agent doesn’t leak my credit card? How do we make sure my agent doesn’t sell my house while it’s looking for a contractor? What does it even mean for an agent to sign a contract on my behalf? Large institutions will have to adopt it as well — that will probably be the biggest change. But once it’s there, this will be really wild. And that’s the biggest bet we built our company, FrontSail AI, on. I believe life is very exciting, and a lot of great changes are ahead of us.