AI agent

“These agents, and I'm so bullish on this future of agents, will be so lightweight that they would probably exist on existing protocols.”

“When it gets into the realm of authoritative, like agents, like I'm just going to let an agent go into the world and act on my behalf. Without supervision, we haven't seen a lot of products that are successful in that space.”

“Building one agent to rule them all is not the right design. You want to have multiple types of agents.”

“If Shopify caused businesses to get started because it lowered the barrier to being able to sell online, if AWS caused applications to get started because I was like, oh, I could just build an app and run it in the cloud. I don't have to think about servers an…”

“When you think about now an organization that has, you know, effectively AI agents that augment the labor or the people in the organization, they're not co-pilots. They're literally autopilots that are going out and doing work for you. That's a, you know, Pret…”

“As you kind of play this forward, you're going to see a whole series of agents. Like I'm not going to go to the New York times.com to read it. I'm going to go to my AI screen and say, fetch me the articles that interest me from the New York times today.”

“I do think that in the agent space, it's extremely important that you own the entire stack from what is the end user interface. I think like we were talking about the Apple example earlier, owning the interface gives you tremendous leverage in this era of AI t…”

“I think we'll get really good agents in the next five years.”

“If you're not able to actually transform the model to be better at the thing that you care about, if you're not the one building the model, if you're just a consumer of the model you're structurally disadvantaged to build that product.”

“Our customers already are using it for revenue generation, sales subscription churn management for subscription services, things like that.”

“The more you give an agency, the more it will have empathy and feel delightful, but the less control you'll have over it.”

“We like to say like in 1995, the way you existed digitally as a business to have a website in 20, 25, the way you will exist digitally is to have an AI agent.”

“You know, we built, we were the first to come out with an AI agent that would do customer support for you, like actual conversations with customers and closing tickets.”

“These AI agents will be way cheaper than humans while they're also better.”

“This is like my off the cuff answer. It's not well-considered, but something that I can give a Long duration tasks to, and provide minimal supervision during execution for.”

“The category I think though is more interesting is not the one that people normally talk about where you have this thing calling restaurants for you, but something that's more like a really smart senior co-worker. Where you can, like, collaborate on a project …”

“To think that you can just replicate a SaaS business because you can tell an agent what it would do, I think is I think is silly.”

“Yeah, I said that six months before she did, so I think it's totally gonna happen.”

“Not because we are scared, because they are like idiot savants. Sometimes they can be extremely smart, sometimes they can be extremely dumb. And you have no idea right now how to distinguish between these two scenarios.”

“Agents will make recommendations. Agents are not gonna take actions directly. There will be a progression from agents making recommendations, going to a human user for validating, and then calling an action.”

“These validations will be actually mostly on the difficult cases in, in the longer term.”

“The better agents are, the more work that they do, the more important it will be that they are easily understood by humans. The idea would be, okay, let's say we have a bunch of employees, 10,000 employees, or 10,000 AI agents drop at a company. They're all ex…”

“So in a lot of ways, UX having a very, very good product is more efficient than AI, but there are also a lot of use cases where AI is good.”

“But they definitely feel it very strongly as like the biggest threat to them to be reduced to that system of record and not the actual like workflow platform. And I think that's pretty likely what would happen, right?”

“I think one of the things is going to happen because I know lots of people are working on it right now is memory is going to get a lot better over the next year or so, which means that as you're using an agent, like, and it remembers more and more about your p…”

“The agents, they will definitely be less transactional, less session-oriented going forward.”

“I think there's going to be more over the next year of you sort of dispatching your agent to go do something and it like goes and works while you are not paying attention to it.”

“There's a split, like, company data is free game. Company data is public. Agents are, like, pretty much at par. Contact data is where the divergence happens.”

“Ultimately, I think the humans don't just always trust AI. They trust other humans using AI. I think, again, depending on the domain, the right thing is more likely that the agent partners with the producer of the work to deliver for the consumer.”

“Whenever you have a shift, like, a UI shift of this magnitude, a lot of the businesses, like, they don't adapt, and so I think there's an opportunity to recreate a lot of the successful business of today in an agent format.”

“These agents are going to get access to all of this data and all of this data, your browser data, all of this stuff. And I think what's going to be possible is debugging very complex tasks. Designing systems is going to be something that these agents are going…”

“I don't think agents are good enough today. That you can kind of just let them operate on top of a database and write to the database, automatically write to the database without human supervision for some arbitrary workflow, right? Right now we're still in th…”

“They're really good at reading systems at scale, but people don't trust them to make rights to systems, to internal databases at scale. That will probably change in six months, right?”

“Yes. I think we're going to price agents against human labor costs, outcomes.”

“I think you fast forward six to 12 months from now, and I think people will be familiar with agents to the same level that, that they're familiar with IDEs today.”

“We have 10 AI agents at our little team that have replaced five humans and it's going to go up.”

“So we're paying 10 grand, 12 grand a month, 12 grand a year for Salesforce. Nominally, nominally, nominally, we're paying 500,000 dollars for 11 AI agents.”

“If you're skating to a puck of, like, AI agents with full agentic behavior, even controlling computers, making full purchase decisions for consumers, that's a huge tam. If you play for where we are today, tiny tam. And also, probably you'll get steamrolled.”

“Absolutely. Like, I mean, who wants to fill in forms or flip the web pages? This is like people punching cards in the seventies. There's no doubt in a couple of years at most, and I used to say like in 10 years, right? Now I say like in one to two years, nobod…”

“Imagine if every nurse and every lawyer and every accountant that works in London becomes a AI agent of some company in the United States in the next 10 years. You're going to hollow out a lot of your labor productivity and give it to a U S company or a Chines…”

“I live it that we've replaced 11 people on our team with AI agents.”

“I don't think we know in the AI era if all those apps just disappear into some godlike Siri agent that we just talked to. I, I'm not a believer in that world view. I don't think it's likely to happen. I do think AI is going to have to change all of those appli…”

“I Vibe Coded eight apps in a hundred days, and we have 12 AI agents working at Sastra now. Replaced all, almost all of our sales team and our whole content team.”

“I think we're gonna have less. I think we're gonna have fewer, more senior engineers who are managing the work of a lot of agents.”

“In terms of agents, you know, we worry a lot about hallucinations in LLMs. The parallel in agents is impersonation.”

“With respect to AI security, I think there's a new front that's opening up with the development of agents, and frankly, there's a lot we don't know yet in terms of the vulnerability of these systems.”

“There are areas where right here, right now, you can replace a 40,000 dollar worker with a 10,000 dollar a year agent and be better off.”

“Next year is AI as part of your team, not replacing folks or layoffs. It is literally embedded in your team.”

“I disagree with that. I think we're seeing useful agentic workflows right now.”

“We essentially have 12 AI agents running now at Sastra more than humans. Okay. And we have five sort of SDR BDRs running.”

“95%. Or a hundred percent, for sure. It's like, ah, you'll be prompting agents.”

“Today, the dominant paradigm is reinforcement learning.”

“I think security is going to benefit the incumbents. I think we're going to be worried that our agents are depositing our data in a hundred different places”

“On a lot of these processes, the reason you have these separate siloed companies is the humans were siloed. There was a sales person and a marketing person, but if the AI is doing everything, let's just take the customer journey. You can have a single AI agent…”

“There was actually a report AWS came out with today, it's interesting, that like, 70% of agents are actually not even, ah, AI agents, as you think of it. Like, most of the agent, agentic processes today are actually traditional script writing and just traditio…”

“I've got to work on AI agents. That's where I get so much because of all this SaaS stuff, I get so much inbound on AI agents, whether it's GTM or otherwise, I got to pick the best thing I can once a quarter and just do that deal and just try to do a 50 X or a …”

“So now you have literally over the course of the last four or five days, about a million and a half agents joining this notebook, which is the network.”

“So if you look at BPOs, you know, business process outsourcing, they're the areas in which there's the least ambiguity, where the job is literally a series of tasks, where people in offshore call centers take a task off the queue. Those things are very well se…”

“I think that the extremist view that we are going to have autonomous agents that simply do everything over incredibly long time horizons, like maybe we'll get there someday, but I do think that at a minimum, you need humans in the loop for exception handling.”

“That software in two years may be obsolete.”

“I believe every platform that is open is at risk that an agent is better than the native platform. And every platform that is closed is, is at risk of being At least slightly bypassed.”

“And I think the next phase that we'll see this year is like for any task I need to do, as opposed to just get information, I go to this text box or this input and something happens that helps me, even if it's not the full task, even if it's only a small part o…”

“As agents start to do work that is not writing code, but more general work, again, for software engineers or beyond for any builder, they're gonna need to start interfacing with other systems. Right? So as they start, maybe your agent is talking to Sentry, rig…”

“Review of the plan is actually something that's becoming more important because we're entering more of this like delegation phase of working with agents.”

“Our 10 agents at Saster generate millions of revenue, but they buy nothing.”

“No one wants to delegate to an agent how to decide what food they get and then have the thing come up.”

“Every agent, here's the problem today, and this will change in the next two years. It is not true today. Every agent is essentially custom, ok? Every agent needs to be trained. Every agent needs to be onboarded. If you want it to be great, ok? Every agent need…”

“I believe the agents are going to own enough of the value that, that that just owning less of the value in your space can create terminal decline.”

“We had a team of about a hundred SDRs and we now doing, doing it with agents. A hundred percent is being done with agents. We move those SDRs to do outbound.”

“Like every agent will leak data if it's allowed to, like every single agent will. That's how goal seeking works.”

“Everyone's data that works in a heterogeneous human AI agent environment, the CSAT is always top 10% for the agents. It's never number one. They never say that the number one most popular person is always a human, but the agent's always in the top.”

“Owen said there's not going to be any difference between support and sales in a lot of what we do. All these agents are converting to a meta agent that does more, replaces a lot of humans and is worth a lot.”

“You do not need to be technical to win with AI agents in Q two of 26. You do not need to be even one percent technical.”

“Agents, agents are goal-seeking and agents are going to make, not only going to make the same mistake as humans, they're going to work a thousand times faster. So even if they make the mistakes, 10% as often, Rory, help me with the math. If they do a thousand …”

“Any upsells, any contracts that the AI agent ends up closing, I will pay those commissions as if like a human actually closed it.”

“If your agents are only 60% as good, you're in a slow death spiral.”

“You checking the box does not work with agents. The check the box feature cannot be monetized in the AI era.”

“Everyone in 18 months will figure out how to build an AA, because they'll get easier and easier to train.”

“Agents are going to be this incredible consumer and creator of your unstructured data. They're gonna Read through every one of your contracts and generate all of your contracts. They're going to generate marketing assets. They're going to write reports for you…”

“I would say that we're in a period right now where basically the market is being treated roughly as in, as the kind of indiscriminately, you know, kind of bucketed sector. And the next year, two years or whatnot, you'll start to see some separation and parsing…”

“All the APIs that our agents use, our AI, VP of marketing, VP of customer service, Salesforce is the best. It is the best API out there. It crushes everybody, okay? This includes all the new guys, everybody.”

“Once you have AI agents doing all this stuff, you're going to want to know what the AI agents are doing. But, and I think, Jason, you're exactly right. This is going to be the huge thing. How do I think about what my little automated bots are doing in my busin…”

“They'll go rogue if you don't manage them.”

“The big picture trend is over the next, as agents kick off, the demand for compute over the medium term will be there.”

“20 late 20 26 into 2027 is most workflows are going to be managed by A.I. Agents, not A.I. Agents working autonomously, not crazy open claws blowing up our Mac minis, but running everything.”

“We are going to more and more bifurcate to folks that just want to collect a paycheck so the agent doesn't displace them, to folks that want to change the world, and that's fine.”

“A CMO today should be able to run their own campaigns, and this is why. I'm not saying you have to spin up Marketo or HubSpot. I'm saying you should be able to tell your agent, and our agent, our AIVP marketing started running its own campaigns the last two we…”

“There's certainly an aspect of a flight to safety during these sort of category creation moments, because this is all new. The sort of general understanding of how agents work and how AI works and how to think about use case design is still being developed. An…”

“When I try to get agents to do all of these workflows throughout Mercure, there's just an enormous amount of context that lives in people's heads that the agents need to have access to perform effectively.”

“And I think that type of guardrail setting will see everywhere. And so, if you're a big enterprise, and you're rolling out AI tooling, and you have agents that build your own internal software, you know, you have AI tools that build your HRAS system, and your,…”

“The current shape of an ID will die. Yes. I think we, I don't know what the new, the next ideas, but it's not reading lines of code. It's maybe it's graphical, honestly. Like maybe it's the systems, the architecture that you look at and you review and you plan…”

“These are all things that the best organizations at like developer experience would invest a lot of resources in, but they would do it because it makes it easier for engineers to work, easier for them to onboard. But the impact of doing that well is just like …”

“My prediction would be agents that are like completely autonomous software engineers. Today, I think we're all using Tools like CloudCode or Codex to write code, but not as literal software engineers.”

“I believe that the 2407 always on agent is going to be realized by the company that wants to play the role of the orchestrator, not the model builder, not the frontier model, but the orchestrator.”

“The real concern actually is the cost. Nobody's going to be able to afford it, a cron job at the fidelity of few seconds. You know that, that runs all the time. And so the bottleneck there is actually orchestration and local compute.”

“That you mine and agents will in large part replace humans, and so the really interesting job function that could be created is like agent resources.”

“We've got about, well, Probably like a hundred core workflows that are costly that we have AI that we're building AI agents for right now. And like five of them are live and working and saving us money and 95 that are under development.”

“But agents can go all the way. Like, we think we can automate the full end to end.”

“If, and if it's a variable price, you could see what you pay to these humans fall by 50 to 60% without even intentionally trying to save money.”

“We have never handed over so much of ourselves to a technology before than we're about to do with agents.”

“I think people will get incredibly comfortable handing over the keys in the same way that we got incredibly comfortable putting our credit cards online using Apple Pay, finding our husband or wife online. And I think that will be de facto in five years.”

“Having products, agents, harnesses that are huge, Human aligned and aligned with your own goals and incentives, I think is going to be really, really important. I think people are going to be a little more self-conscious about the incentives of the model they'…”

“In the future, all of that institutional learning is actually going to accumulate in that agent that is doing that work.”

“What we found works amazingly is literally to give the files to an agent, tell it to write Python to get these files into a standardized format, because they're not very good at parsing files, but they're incredibly good at code gen, and so you can tell it to …”

“I think it's the future for the short term as the knowledge of how to use AI gets disseminated throughout industry. We have basically a concentration of a bunch of people in San Francisco who really know how to deploy agents, eval agents, Be AI first in engine…”

“So I think we need guardian models and also, you know, agents within our businesses. What is a guardian model? Something that can witness the traces basically that's looking over the shoulder of every agent within a business and then saying, okay, this is a sa…”

“Rumor has it, agents are going to be important. If agents are important, they're going to need identities. They need to be treated like privileged identities, so that's our thesis.”

“So the best companies in PLG focus right now will also be best positioned, in my opinion, for the agentic layer of essentially decisions being made without that human in the loop when tools are being selected for certain tasks.”

“I think it was Cloudflare this morning said that in five years from now, we'll have 1000 times the amount of agent traffic to human traffic.”

“We're already at parity in terms of agent traffic to human traffic.”

“Next year, there's going to be backlash. I can see it in my best portfolio companies where we can't go back anymore. We can't live. We can't go back in time. And I need my 10 sub agents running 24 hours a day to do my job or I quit.”

“If you look out three to five years, those agents are going to be fully autonomous.”

“And then that job will be made irrelevant five years from then, because AI agents will govern themselves.”

“There's no, you can't take Jason's agent out to a steak dinner to get him to buy your product. It just has to be better.”

“The learning and here's the meta learning guardrails aren't enough. You have to have a lock and key. Guard, it doesn't matter whether you build 80 gates, a hundred gates, 200 gates, like, they're not enough, and they get, and then, you know, what's even worse,…”

“I think it is the human's responsibility to first allocate the resources. That means to say how many tokens are we willing to spend to try to get a goal to set the goal right as well. So you set the goal and the budget and then to monitor, right? Like the over…”

“I think you'll trust your agent to decide what data to share with other people without you intervening in five years.”