Silicon Valley is bullish on AI brokers. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mentioned brokers will “be a part of the workforce” this yr. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted that brokers will change sure data work. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff mentioned that Salesforce’s objective is to be “the primary supplier of digital labor on this planet” through the corporate’s varied “agentic” companies.
However nobody can appear to agree on what an AI agent is, precisely.
In the previous few years, the tech trade has boldly proclaimed that AI “brokers” — the newest buzzword — are going to vary every little thing. In the identical means that AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT gave us new methods to floor info, brokers will essentially change how we method work, declare CEOs like Altman and Nadella.
Which may be true. But it surely additionally will depend on how one defines “brokers,” which is not any straightforward process. Very like different AI-related jargon (e.g. “multimodal,” “AGI,” and “AI” itself), the phrases “agent” and “agentic” have gotten diluted to the purpose of meaninglessness.
That threatens to depart OpenAI, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, Google, and the numerous different corporations constructing whole product lineups round brokers in an ungainly place. An agent from Amazon isn’t the identical as an agent from Google or another vendor, and that’s resulting in confusion — and buyer frustration.
Ryan Salva, senior director of product at Google and an ex-GitHub Copilot chief, mentioned he’s come to “hate” the phrase “brokers.”
“I believe that our trade overuses the time period ‘agent’ to the purpose the place it’s virtually nonsensical,” Salva informed iinfoai in an interview. “[It is] one among my pet peeves.”
The agent definition dilemma isn’t new. In a chunk final yr, former iinfoai reporter Ron Miller requested: What’s an AI agent? The issue he recognized is that almost each firm constructing brokers approaches the tech otherwise.
It’s an issue that’s worsened not too long ago.
This week, OpenAI revealed a weblog publish that outlined brokers as “automated methods that may independently accomplish duties on behalf of customers.” But in the identical week, the corporate launched developer documentation that outlined brokers as “LLMs outfitted with directions and instruments.”
Leher Pathak, OpenAI’s API product advertising lead, later mentioned in a publish on X that she understood the phrases “assistants” and “brokers” to be interchangeable — additional muddying the waters.
In the meantime, Microsoft’s blogs attempt to distinguish between brokers and AI assistants. The previous, which Microsoft calls the “new apps” for an “AI-powered world,” will be tailor-made to have a specific experience, whereas assistants merely assist with common duties, like drafting emails.
AI lab Anthropic addresses the hodgepodge of agent definitions somewhat extra straight. In a weblog publish, Anthropic says that brokers “will be outlined in a number of methods,” together with each “totally autonomous methods that function independently over prolonged intervals” and “prescriptive implementations that observe predefined workflows.”
Salesforce has what’s maybe probably the most wide-ranging definition of AI “agent.” In line with the software program large, brokers are “a sort of […] system that may perceive and reply to buyer inquiries with out human intervention.” The corporate’s web site lists six totally different classes, starting from “easy reflex brokers” to “utility-based brokers.”
So why the chaos?
Effectively, brokers — like AI — are a nebulous factor, they usually’re continually evolving. OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity have simply began delivery what they think about to be their first brokers — OpenAI’s Operator, Google’s Venture Mariner, and Perplexity’s buying agent — and their capabilities are everywhere in the map.
Wealthy Villars, GVP of worldwide analysis at IDC, famous that tech corporations “have an extended historical past” of not rigidly adhering to technical definitions.
“They care extra about what they’re attempting to perform” on a technical stage, Villars informed iinfoai, “particularly in fast-evolving markets.”
However advertising can also be in charge largely, in accordance with Andrew Ng, the founding father of AI studying platform DeepLearning.ai.
“The ideas of AI ‘brokers’ and ‘agentic’ workflows used to have a technical that means,” Ng mentioned in a current interview, “however a few yr in the past, entrepreneurs and some massive corporations received a maintain of them.”
The dearth of a unified definition for brokers is each a chance and a problem, Jim Rowan, head of AI for Deloitte, says. On the one hand, the anomaly permits for flexibility, letting corporations customise brokers to their wants. On the opposite, it might — and arguably already has — result in “misaligned expectations” and difficulties in measuring the worth and ROI from agentic initiatives.
“And not using a standardized definition, no less than inside a corporation, it turns into difficult to benchmark efficiency and guarantee constant outcomes,” Rowan mentioned. “This may end up in diverse interpretations of what AI brokers ought to ship, probably complicating mission targets and outcomes. In the end, whereas the flexibleness can drive inventive options, a extra standardized understanding would assist enterprises higher navigate the AI agent panorama and maximize their investments.”
Sadly, if the unraveling of the time period “AI” is any indication, it appears unlikely the trade will coalesce round one definition of “agent” anytime quickly — if ever.
