Skip the hype, here’s how AI ‘agents’ can really help 

SO-CALLED agents are meant to be the next big thing in artificial intelligence this year. If the breathless headlines about them are to be believed, you might think your job is on the line. It’s not (for now at least) – but some back-office occupations probably are.

Last week, OpenAI announced its first agent-like tool called Operator, which carries out online tasks such as navigating to a website and clicking on buttons, according to the company. But the idea is not unique. Alphabet’s Google, Anthropic and Salesforce have all launched platforms for agents, or AI systems that can act autonomously. Imagine, for instance, a customer service bot that doesn’t just generate information, but can also book an appointment or lodge a complaint. Mark Zuckerberg has said they’ll replace mid-level software engineers this year, and earlier this month, Axios reported that a tech firm was preparing to release software that could autonomously handle complex tasks at a “PhD level”. The hype around AI agents and their capabilities has reached fever pitch.

Yet while Silicon Valley dreams big, a small startup in London called Rekki offers a more realistic preview of how agents could transform business. It sells access to a bot dubbed Claire, which processes orders for restaurant suppliers. Using large-language models from vendors such as OpenAI and Anthropic, the software can convert midnight voice mails from chefs into standardised data for a food seller’s enterprise-resource planning (ERP) systems.