A Reality Check on Agents

Around the start of this year, executives at artificial intelligence providers like OpenAI and Salesforce said 2025 would be “the year of agents,” making it seem like fully autonomous AI would soon take over human jobs. Since then, Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP and many others pitched roughly seven types of agent to automate white collar tasks in realms like coding, HR, finance, and sales. 

But the promise of truly autonomous agents still hasn’t been fulfilled, and tech leaders are warning companies to lower their expectations.

Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI and a leading voice in AI research, believes it’ll take at least a decade until AI can meaningfully automate entire jobs, “like an employee or intern that you would hire to work with you.” In a podcast interview, he gave a brutal assessment of AI’s current capabilities, in part because large language models lack cognition, and argued that most jobs still can’t be automated.