This last month of 2024 had me re-connecting with some AI world friends, and making some new ones. One thing that leapt out at me as I podcasted and webinar-ed my way through December was AI agents. Agentic AI is everywhere, and I’m responsible for at least a tiny sliver of all that agent-focused content.
First, I had the opportunity to moderate a discussion on agentic AI with two founders building companies based on the tech. Mikhil Raja and Dmitry Shapiro joined me right here on The Cosmos for a lively chat about the concept and application of AI agents.
Mikhil’s company, SonicJobs, is building agents to make the job recruitment and application process smoother for employers and job seekers alike. Job applications are actually SonicJobs’ starting point — their aspirations for agentic AI stretch further and wider. Mikhil actually guested on the AI Podcast a few months ago — it’s a great listen if you want to learn even more about the company and their approach.
Dmitry’s company, MindStudio, is building a no-code development platform for AI agents, or “AI workers” as they call them. The nomenclature is actually quite interesting — as Dmitry explained during the webinar, the AI workers people are building on MindStudio are intentionally a bit narrower in scope and capabilities than AI agents. MindStudio is focused on helping people quickly and easily spin up AI-powered workflows that they can use on real-world tasks right now. I used MindStudio quite a bit earlier this year — even earning my certification as a partner — and it was remarkable to see how much the platform has advanced even in just the past few months. Their new one-click (one prompt) workflow generator really feels like a taste of the future, and it’s available for anyone to use right now.
I also had the chance to talk with another agent-focused founder for NVIDIA’s AI Podcast. Kanjun Qiu, CEO of Imbue, has a vision of a future where everyone is empowered to build and use their own AI agents. This was a fascinating conversation for me — I’d never met Kanjun before, and found her approach and insights really compelling. Definitely check this episode out for another slightly different perspective on the potential AI agents hold to transform the Internet, and the way we all get things done.
If 2023 was the year of LLMs and chatbots, this year has been all about application developers starting to figure out how software should best be rethought in the age of AI. Could 2025 be The Year of the AI Agents, when we start to really embrace automated, intelligent assistants that can go out into the digital world and get things done on our behalf?
Maybe. Expect a lot of activity (and buzz) around AI agents in the coming year, for sure. Whether that energy swirls around proprietary, task-specific agents like SonicJobs’, or tools to enable more of us to roll our own agents — or workers — remains to be seen. A lot of people’s definition of “AI agents” revolves around the agents’ ability to learn on the job, picking up new skills and remembering how to use them next time around. We’re not quite there yet on the memory and self-learning fronts. But we all know how fast this industry is (still) moving. Who knows, maybe by late December of 2025, AI agents will, in fact, be rapidly transforming how us humans get things done.