AI Agents Are a Moment of Truth for Technology

Nearly every facet of tech has money riding the adoption of AI that can make a decision

- Steven Rosenbush

AIl emerging technology needs to deliver on its promise, sooner or later. For AI agents, that time is now.

The successful deployment of agents—artificial intelligence that can take actions and make decisions on behalf of people or even themselves—is vital to the future of model developers such as OpenAI, enterprise software companies like ServiceNow and Salesforce, consumer giants such as Apple, plus AI infrastructure companies including Nvidia, cloud service providers and data center operators. That's not even to mention all the public and private investment capital riding on those companies' results.

AI agents are so important because they are expected to power a new generation of products and capabilities that will drive revenue, through grabby consumer applications such as Apple Intelligence and the transformation of business functions like coding, customer service and supply-chain management.

All of that activity should in theory spur demand for ever-more computing power and storage, as well as faster networks, especially as agents become imbued with greater reasoning power, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said this month at the company's annual GTC developers' conference. AI's next-generation reasoning capabilities will require 100 times as much computing power than seemed necessary for AI a year ago, he said.

Investors are growing trepidatious, however, as the IPO of startup CoreWeave shows. The company, which rents out access to Nvidia AI infrastructure, priced its initial public offering below expectations late Thursday at $40, and opened even lower on Friday before closing at $40.