What Are AI Agents—And Who Profits From Them? — from every.to by Evan Armstrong
The newest wave of AI research is changing everything
I’ve spent months talking with founders, investors, and scientists, trying to understand what this technology is and who the players are. Today, I’m going to share my findings. I’ll cover:
- What an AI agent is
- The major players
- The technical bets
- The future
Agentic workflows are loops—they can run many times in a row without needing a human involved for each step in the task. A language model will make a plan based on your prompt, utilize tools like a web browser to execute on that plan, ask itself if that answer is right, and close the loop by getting back to you with that answer.
But agentic workflows are an architecture, not a product. It gets even more complicated when you incorporate agents into products that customers will buy.
…
Early reports of GPT-5 are that it is “materially better” and is being explicitly prepared for the use case of AI agents.