This post was originally published on Stack Overflow
When I went to the first HumanX conference in January 2025, agents were vaguely-defined frontier tech. It was the first time I heard the letters MCP. The big conversations were around inference, hallucinations, and retrieval augmented generation. The tech felt new—Tomasz Tunguz of Theory Ventures called it the “bottom of the first inning.” Every company was running AI experiments all the time.
Since then, companies have played a few innings in the AI game. As Anish Agarwal, CEO at Traversal told me, “More companies have gone through a renewal cycle with customers. They’ve understood what it takes to actually win a contract.” LLMs no longer run raw call and response games in company chatbots. We’ve attached tooling, implemented automation, attached evals, and formalized these as agents, usually with the word “claw” in the name. They—and their customers—need to justify the ballooning token spend with real results.
I started saying that we’re in the “find out” stage of AI, meaning we’re past the experimental phase of AI and entering into one where they need to work and provide real value. HumanX validated that notion, with almost everybody who gave comments referring to “an inflection point”, “a second phase of AI”, and “the conversation
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