2025 is supposed to be the year of agents according to the big tech players. Better and cheaper models, more powerful tools (MCP, memory, RAG, etc.) and 10X inference speed are making agents better and more affordable. But what most customers struggle with isn't the capabilities, it's reliability.
Most customers don't need complex AI systems. They need simple and reliable automation workflows with clear ROI. The "book a flight" agent demos are very far away from this reality. Reliability, transparency, and compliance are top criteria when firms are evaluating AI solutions.
Here are a few "non-fancy" AI agent use cases from our customers that automate tasks and execute them in a highly accurate and reliable way:
These are all relatively unexciting use cases that I automated with AI agents. It comes down to such relatively unexciting use cases where AI adds the most value.
Agents won't eliminate our jobs, but they will automate tedious, repetitive work such as web scraping, form filling, and data entry.
Many of our customers tried to build their own AI agents, but often struggled to get them to the desire reliability. The top reasons why these in-house initiatives often fail:
Data is the competitive edge of many financial services firms, and it has been traditionally limited by the capacity of their data scientists. This is changing now as data and research teams can do a lot more with a lot less by using AI agents across the entire data stack. Automating well constrained tasks with highly-reliable agents is where we are at now.
But we should not narrowly see AI agents as replacing work that already gets done. Most AI agents will be used to automate tasks/research that humans/rule-based systems never got around to doing before because it was too expensive or time consuming.