Smart Agents: Evolution, Challenges, and Future

Concept of the Smart Agent and its Evolution Stages

The fictional J.A.R.V.I.S system in Marvel films helped establish the concept of the Smart Agent, with industry experts pointing to it as an ideal example of an Artificial Intelligence tool that understands your needs, analyzes data, and provides strategic advice. While the precise definition of a Smart Agent may vary, it transcends the capabilities of chatbots through its ability to perform complex multi-step tasks on behalf of the user without constant interaction. The Smart Agent creates its own list of sub-tasks to achieve the desired ultimate goal.

The year 2023 saw increasing talk about the concept of Smart Agents in the tech industry, while 2024 focused on deploying and applying these technologies, though initial results were limited and full of error messages. These challenges are often due to the difficulty of building AI models that can accurately understand and interpret complex contexts, in addition to the need for high adaptive capabilities to deal with unexpected environments and data. Integrating Smart Agents with existing systems also poses a significant technical challenge that requires innovative solutions to ensure seamless integration and reliable performance. Forbes (February 09, 2024)

Leading Applications and Adoption by Major Companies

The buzz around Smart Agents significantly escalated in February 2024, when fintech company Klarna announced that its AI-powered assistant, supported by OpenAI technology, performed the work of 700 full-time customer service employees and automated two-thirds of the company's customer service conversations within a single month. These statistics became the focus of many discussions in the Artificial Intelligence industry, highlighting the transformative potential of Smart Agents in improving operational efficiency and customer experience.

This buzz continued, and executives of major tech companies like Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft began to focus on their commitment to building useful and successful AI agents. For instance, Amazon is developing "Agents for Amazon Bedrock" to help developers build AI-powered applications, while Meta is committed to developing multimodal AI agents to enhance human-machine interaction. Google focuses on Smart Agents capable of self-planning and learning in diverse environments, while Microsoft integrates Smart Agents into its products like Copilot to increase productivity. AWS (2024), Meta AI (2023), Google DeepMind (2023)

Current Innovations and Future Trends

The future vision included the ability of a Smart Agent to accomplish various tasks, from booking travel to creating corporate presentations, and even coordinating social activities with friends, taking into account everyone's schedules, dietary preferences, booking restaurants, and creating calendar events.

For many years, the field of AI programming has been the main driver of the Smart Agents industry. When experts are asked about practical and successful applications of Smart Agents today, they point to AI programming as the only tangible example. Many engineers use AI agents in programming, and these tools are so good that up to 30% of the code at Microsoft and Google is now written by AI agents. For startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, AI programming tools for enterprise customers are one of the biggest revenue sources. Last October, Anthropic introduced its "Computer Use" tool, which allowed Claude to use the computer like humans, by browsing the web, searching, accessing different platforms, and completing complex tasks on behalf of the user. In January 2025, OpenAI launched Operator, its own version of the same concept, designed to fill forms, order groceries, book trips, and create memes. Although these tools were significant steps, many users found them slow, buggy, and not always effective. The following month, OpenAI launched Deep Research, an AI agent tool that could compile lengthy research reports on any topic, and in July, OpenAI integrated Deep Research and Operator into a single product, ChatGPT Agent. Although it was better than most consumer-facing Smart Agent tools, it was still difficult to make it work successfully in practice. There is still a long way to go to achieve the full vision of the ideal Smart Agent, but we are closer than ever. Therefore, tech companies are investing more money in Smart Agents, through additional computing, research and development, and talent. Google recently hired the CEO, co-founder, and some R&D team members from Windsurf to push its AI agent projects. Windsurf was a startup specializing in providing data-driven insights, and the acquisition of its team indicates Google's direction towards enhancing its capabilities in Smart Agents that can deeply understand and analyze data. TechCrunch (February 09, 2024). And companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to deliver incremental features to put these agents into the hands of consumers.

The Future of Smart Agents and Expected Transformations

In the future, AI programming is expected to continue evolving and may replace the jobs of many junior software engineers. Consumer-facing agent products will also slowly but steadily improve. The use of agents will increase in corporate and government applications, especially after Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI recently introduced government-specific AI platforms in recent months.

Overall, we expect to see more failed attempts, sporadic successes, and mergers and acquisitions as competition intensifies in the Smart Agents field and the hype bubble expands. We must ask ourselves, as the months pass, what do we really want "the Smart Agent" to do for us? Do we want them to replace only the logistical aspects, or also the personal and human aspects of life? And how good are they at assisting with logistical versus personal aspects? (The answer to the latter question: not very good at the moment). Nevertheless, Smart Agents can already help organize appointments, manage email, and plan travel, saving users valuable time. Forbes (February 09, 2024).

Challenges and Concerns: Environment and Security

In addition to the exorbitant environmental cost of Artificial Intelligence, especially for large models that support Smart Agents efforts, there are concerns about the misuse of "smarter AI that can do anything for you," especially when people want to use it for nefarious purposes, such as creating chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons. Large AI models consume vast amounts of energy, contributing to increased carbon emissions. For example, training a large language model can produce the equivalent of 626,000 pounds of CO2, nearly five times the lifetime emissions of an average American car. MIT Technology Review (December 28, 2022). AI companies say they are increasingly concerned about these risks, although they do not stop building.

Many people have concerns about the implications of Artificial Intelligence, but many do not fully realize the potential risks posed by highly helpful AI agents in the hands of bad actors, domestically and internationally (e.g., "mood control," romance scams, and more). "Mood control" techniques can be used to manipulate emotions and thoughts through elaborate interaction patterns, while romance scams aim to exploit individuals financially and emotionally by building false relationships. FBI (February 07, 2024). AI companies say they are getting ahead of the risks through voluntary safeguards they have implemented. But many others say this may be a case requiring external scrutiny.