The Deep View: AI Agents in 2025 …

Posted on January 2, 2026 by michelleclarke2015

 ENTERPRISE AI Agents in 2025: Breakthrough or overhyped?


It’s clear that 2025 was the year tech companies became obsessed with humans doing less. Practically every big tech firm went crazy over AI agents last year. The constant refrain at major conferences was agentic innovation, as these firms repeatedly touted the astonishing productivity gains that could result from installing digital coworkers alongside existing human workforces. 

Enterprise C-suites were all in on breaking agents out of the pilot phase and automating legacy processes. Agents even brought tech rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft together in a coalition dedicated to developing open-source standards for them. The excitement around the tech has reached such a fever pitch that Salesforce is even considering a total rebrand to Agentforce (à la Facebook-to-Meta in 2021). 

The big takeaway? We’ve built foundational models with formidable intelligence. Agents let us actually do something with them, Steve Zisk, principal data strategist for Redpoint Global, told The Deep View. “We’re finally at a point where the AI pattern recognition engines, if you will, start to actually resemble what people think of as human interactions,” said Zisk. “That has meant that a lot of people on both sides of the equation, the consumers, the big brands, big companies and so on, are reassessing what they can actually hand off to the machine.” Agents are the natural evolution of where AI and technology broadly are going, Prasidh Srikanth, senior director of product management at Palo Alto Networks, told me. Search engines democratized information, chatbots democratized intelligence, and now agents democratize work, he said. “It’s behaving on behalf of a human being, thinking about our intelligence and actually making sense of what you need to do to fulfill an objective,” Srikanth said. 

But despite all the buzz, anticipation and starry-eyed hopes, agents are far from ready to be our actual work companions, Neil Dhar, global managing partner at IBM Consulting, told me. As it stands, we’re still in the “first or second inning of the whole agent race,” he said. And while enterprises are aware that agents have the potential to upend the way we work, “people are just getting in tune with what an agent actually is.”
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About michelleclarke2015

Life event that changes all: Horse riding accident in Zimbabwe in 1993, a fractured skull et al including bipolar anxiety, chronic fatigue …. co-morbidities (Nietzche 'He who has the reason why can deal with any how' details my health history from 1993 to date). 17th 2017 August operation for breast cancer (no indications just an appointment came from BreastCheck through the Post). Trinity College Dublin Business Economics and Social Studies (but no degree) 1997-2003; UCD 1997/1998 night classes) essays, projects, writings. Trinity Horizon Programme 1997/98 (Centre for Women Studies Trinity College Dublin/St. Patrick's Foundation (Professor McKeon) EU Horizon funded: research study of 15 women (I was one of this group and it became the cornerstone of my journey to now 2017) over 9 mth period diagnosed with depression and their reintegration into society, with special emphasis on work, arts, further education; Notes from time at Trinity Horizon Project 1997/98; Articles written for Irishhealth.com 2003/2004; St Patricks Foundation monthly lecture notes for a specific period in time; Selection of Poetry including poems written by people I know; Quotations 1998-2017; other writings mainly with theme of social justice under the heading Citizen Journalism Ireland. Letters written to friends about life in Zimbabwe; Family history including Michael Comyn KC, my grandfather, my grandmother's family, the O'Donnellan ffrench Blake-Forsters; Moral wrong: An acrimonious divorce but the real injustice was the Catholic Church granting an annulment – you can read it and make your own judgment, I have mine. Topics I have written about include annual Brain Awareness week, Mashonaland Irish Associataion in Zimbabwe, Suicide (a life sentence to those left behind); Nostalgia: Tara Hill, Co. Meath.
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