We dive into what agents are, their limitations, key companies, and implications for the future of work.
An empowered digital workforce would reshape industries as we know them. The implications would be enormous, changing how companies hire and scale, as well as what they can achieve with a small headcount.
That future isn’t too far off.
The idea of autonomous AI agents — LLM-powered bots that can independently reason and execute tasks — caught on like wildfire in 2023, marking an important evolution beyond chatbots and copilots.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has described agents as “AI’s killer function” as recently as May 2024.
While much of the tech remains limited in its ability to execute tasks reliably, use cases are gaining traction in horizontal enterprise applications like customer support, sales, and engineering.
We mined CB Insights startup, financing, business model, and buyer interview data to map the evolving landscape and analyze its future.
In the 28-page report, we cover:
- The state of AI agents: Investment is surging to companies in the space, but limitations — most notably, agent reliability — remain.
- Leading horizontal applications and impacts: The landscape of VC-backed agent startups is dominated by a focus on horizontal applications — across sales, customer support, and other enterprise and general productivity workflows.
- Emerging industry applications and opportunities: While few agentic companies focus on single industries, companies are emerging to target workflows across financial services, industrials, and more.
Download the full report to get all of the data and analysis.
