Chill Out On The Agents

I was going to write about Salesforce's Agentforce 2dx announcement. It was simultaneously hilarious and poignant, wry and wise. You would have loved to read my insightful commentary on things like how Marc Benioff is the biggest Copilot hater in the world, or how Salesforce's "Data Cloud" product makes SAP's choice of nomenclature "Business Data Cloud" all the more confusing and bland. I might've even tossed in a snarky Joule aside.

But I think "agents" and "agentic" are starting to be like that thing where if you repeat a word enough it starts to sound like nonsense. (Try it! Say your own name out loud a hundred times in a row.) What they do is amazing, what they will be able to do very soon will be even more amazing.

The endless announcements and hype confuse reality. Over the long term, if you take care to speak truthfully and act meaningfully, the stars will align. In the frontier AI space Anthropic does the best job of this. They do something worthwhile, say it clearly, and strip out hyperbole.

And then every time I go make fun of some agent announcement I'm just adding to the problem! So I'm going to shut my mouth on agents for a while. PM