Everyone’s calling 2025 the year of AI agents.
But that’s not quite right.
If you talk to the people actually building these systems (or the companies trying to integrate them) what you’ll hear is that this is the decade of agents, not the year.
We’re at the very beginning of a ten-year cycle of experimentation, infrastructure building, and human adaptation.
We’re not even close to “set it and forget it” automation.
Thanks for reading,
Robbie Allen
Founder & Managing Director
Automated Consulting Group
PS: If you’re thinking about equipping your team with agents or other AI-powered workflow tools, hit reply — I’d love to hear what you’re working on and share what we’re learning from client transformations.
Key Takeaways:
The “year of agents” narrative is premature — we’re at the start of a long maturation curve.
Most agents today are brittle prompt chains, not autonomous systems.
Real value lies in human-AI collaboration, not replacement.
Leaders should focus on workflow redesign and habit formation, not hype.
The Promise and the Reality
The dream is simple:
You tell an AI, “Book me a trip to New York next week,” and it figures out the flights, hotel, and rental car automatically.
We’re nowhere near this today.
Even something as “trivial” as booking travel is filled with subtle human nuance:
“I prefer morning flights, but only if there’s an aisle seat. I’ll take an afternoon flight if it’s cheaper, but not if it’s a middle seat. And if I have to connect through Atlanta, forget it.”
That level of preference and judgment seems simple when you’re doing it yourself, but try encoding it into an AI system, and you’ll realize how much of it depends on instinct, context, and tradeoffs.
We’ll get there eventually, but not this year. Maybe not even this decade.
Why the Tech Isn’t Ready
Andrej Karpathy recently called this the decade of agents, and he’s right.
We’ll spend the next several years just getting the underlying infrastructure, governance, and orchestration right before these systems can deliver on their promise.
Most of what we call “agents” today are really chained prompts with short-term memory — clever, but fragile. They work fine in controlled demos but struggle with real-world complexity or ambiguity.
That’s not because the models aren’t powerful enough. It’s because they lack intentionality. They imitate, but they don’t decide.
As Rich Sutton put it, large language models are imitative, not intelligent. They generate what humans would say, not what a system should do.
That distinction matters when you start giving them autonomy.
How This Will Play Out
Three trends will define how the “agent decade” unfolds:
1. Vertical Before General
The first successful agents won’t be general-purpose. They’ll be deep specialists built for functions like finance, legal, or customer success that combine tuned models, clear workflows, and structured data with the goal of augmenting humans in repeatable tasks.
Think function-first copilots, not all-purpose assistants.
2. The Rise of Orchestration
Winners won’t just build agents; they’ll build systems to manage them. Expect new “agentic infrastructure” — memory layers, reasoning engines, and control systems that let multiple agents coordinate while keeping humans in the loop.
This will become the new middleware of the enterprise stack.
3. Governance and Human Adaptation
The real challenge isn’t agents “going rogue” — it’s alignment. Dozens of semi-independent agents optimizing locally can create chaos across an organization. That’s why governance and training will matter as much as model accuracy.
Technology will mature quickly, but behavior won’t. The companies that win will train their people as deliberately as their models.
The Takeaway for Leaders
For executives, the lesson is simple:
Don’t build your 2025 strategy on the fantasy of full autonomy. Build it on augmentation — humans and AI working together.
The best-performing companies right now are using agents to amplify people, not replace them. They’re building co-pilots for operations, not pilots that fly the plane.
It’s the same pattern we’ve seen in every major technology cycle: the winners aren’t the ones who overcommit early — they’re the ones who learn faster, integrate steadily, and stay flexible.
It’s year one of a decade that will redefine how we work.