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Subject to availability while stocks last. For Scientific American Science quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman.

Have you ever been chatting with a customer service rep and just felt like they're a little off?

Well, customer service is a tough job, so maybe you're the problem.

But it's also possible you were communicating with an AI agent.

These are computer programs designed to autonomously execute tasks.

So while you might use a chatbot powered by a large

language model to answer a specific question using data scraped from the internet, you could give

an agentic AI system a task like, design a website for my new bakery, and expect it to at least try

to accomplish the whole project out in the real world.

Depending on how you design your agent and how much freedom you give it,

one of these computer programs could create its own login on a web hosting service,

scour the internet for examples of good marketing copy about croissants,

generate a few fake photos of kids with too many fingers enjoying cupcakes. You get the

idea. Before you know it, you've got a bakery website, though. Maybe not a very good one.

When global management consulting firm McKinsey and Company surveyed nearly 2,000 people about AI

usage last year, 62% of respondents said their companies were at least experimenting with AI agents.

Now, many of those prospective agents are likely doomed to be faceless customer service reps or

code monkeys. But to hear the AI industry hype machine tell it, agentic AI could replace just

...