We Can't Afford to Rush the March of AI Agents

Autonomy without trust is a recipe for failure.

- Catherine Thorbecke

If there was a singular buzzword to emerge at Asia's largest tech conference last week, it was "agents". I jotted it down more than a dozen times from various executive talks and seminars at Taiwan's Computex. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang described them as future "digital employees." An executive at a semiconductor firm referred to agentic artificial intelligence as "the next paradigm shift." I watched countless demo videos featuring bots taking on increasingly complex tasks in users' work and personal lives – from putting together a marketing presentation to turning off the lights in your child's bedroom after they've fallen asleep.

The industry push behind agents, tools that go beyond chatbots to being able to execute a range of actions on their own, isn't new. The sector has spent the better part of the last six months promising that this is the year of AI agents. But the hype train seemed to kick into overdrive last week, with a spate of global headlines from Alphabet's Google, OpenAI, as well as Tokyo-based Sakana AI and Chinese start-up Manus.

Still, there remain foundational cracks that will hold them back in the near term. And that's a good thing.