AI Agent Landscape Decoded – Claire & Greta

Are you hearing about AI agents everywhere right now? Whether it’s their presence in the software you use daily, special purpose or task “agents”, or customer service “agents”, it’s safe to say they are the topic ‘du jour’. 

In this week’s episode, we segment this confusing landscape and cut through the hype to help you make more sense of it all.

After weeks of interviewing guests across different corners of the agentic AI world, we realised the market has become genuinely bewildering, even for us! Vendors are slapping the word “agent” on almost anything, and it’s getting harder to tell what’s substantive and what’s marketing.

Listen in to hear about the simple framework we’ve developed to bring clarity to the whole ecosystem. It maps out the key choices facing any business considering agents, the questions you should be asking, and where the real risks are quietly hiding.

Regardless of whether your organisation is ready to start experimenting with agents or not, this episode will help you take the first steps when you are ready. As they say, when you can see something clearly, your decisions become easier.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• The four very different ways to bring agents into your organisation — and why the question isn’t “which is best?”
• Why some of the SaaS tools you already pay for might quietly be putting you in a “hostage situation”
• What a team of Harvard, MIT and Stanford researchers just uncovered about one of the most hyped agent platforms on the market
• The layer of the agent ecosystem where the real cyber security risks live
• Four sharp questions to ask any vendor before letting their agent anywhere near your data and systems

Enjoy this practical and jargon-light guide to a topic that isn’t going away anytime soon.

Useful Links

• McKinsey / Quantum Black report: Seizing the agentic AI advantage
• Capgemini report – ‘Rise of Agentic AI’
• MIT Sloan & BCG Report – Leading in the age of AI Agents (useful for Governance and structuring once you’ve made agentic decisions)