Forget the hype — real AI agents solve bounded problems, not open-world fantasies

Everywhere you look, people are talking about AI agents like they’re just a prompt away from replacing entire departments. The dream is seductive: Autonomous systems that can handle anything you throw at them, no guardrails, no constraints, just give them your AWS credentials and they’ll solve all your problems. But the reality is that’s just not how the world works, especially not in the enterprise, where reliability isn’t optional.

Even if an agent is 99% accurate, that’s not always good enough. If it’s optimizing food delivery routes, that means one out of every hundred orders ends up at the wrong address. In a business context, that kind of failure rate isn’t acceptable. It’s expensive, risky and hard to explain to a customer or regulator.

In real-world environments like finance, healthcare and operations, the AI systems that actually deliver value don’t look ...