Humans have automated tasks for centuries. Now, AI companies see a path to profit in harnessing our love of efficiency, and they’ve got a name for their solution: agents. AI agents are autonomous programs that perform tasks, make decisions, and interact with environments with little human input, and they’re the focus of every major company working on AI today. Microsoft has “Copilots” designed to help businesses automate things like customer service and administrative tasks.
Couldn’t the AI assistant be used for spam calls? Why didn’t it identify itself as an AI system? The unease was palpable, and it wasn’t surprising — even without agents, AI tools are already being used for deception. There was another, arguably more immediate problem: the demo didn’t work. The agent lacked enough information and incorrectly recorded dessert flavors, causing it to auto-populate flavors like vanilla and strawberry in a column, rather than saying it didn’t have that information.