AI agents have a problem full stop - Rethinking The Hype Cycle #8

Going "AI-first" isn’t always such a hoot🦉

AI owls: be careful what you wish for. AI-generated with ChatGPT

Hello👋

We're back with Rethinking the Hype Cycle, your practical guide to AI and what's next in tech for curious leaders.

These past two weeks have been loaded with heaps of hype, before unexpected U-turns on 'AI-first' hardline strategies, as those pesky customer needs proved harder to handle than initially thought.

Your regular reminder: If you're not working on the bleeding edge, you don't need to bleed.

On to the trends. 👉

🔮AI and frontier tech trends

And the winner in the AI tool race is...

Terribly colour-coded but useful charts show 2 in 5 US businesses now pay for AI tools. OpenAI leads adoption by miles. Anthropic races behind at a gap. X, Google and others' market share is almost non-existent.

As ChatGPT becomes synonymous with AI, much like Zoom was to online meetings during the pandemic, will this stride in advantage lock in its dominance for both business and consumer use? Bear in mind that first-mover advantage doesn't often play out long-term. Zoom's lead withered when incumbent IT took over. We 'Teams' now more than we 'Zoom'. We 'hoover' with brands other than the original from William Henry Hoover. (Henry remains the best hoover brand of all time, though. The rest suck).

Microsoft didn't let 7,000 people go because of AI

"No large-scale empirical studies confirm that Generative AI is actively replacing workers across core business functions."

AI thinker Stephen Klein crunches historical data on Microsoft's recent L-AI-offs, surmising they were reshaping anyway. We're seeing a 'blame it on AI' trend. Companies claim they're scaling back or not hiring as their magical AI machine makes them more productive. In reality, the economy bites in our geopolitical wild times, and many industries are shrinking.

For developers, the AI threat is real. Some organisations opt for AI-led coding with a smaller pool of developers fixing the post-automated mess. This report of a 6-figure salaried New York developer downsizing to a trailer: "AI isn't taking over the tech industry – it's turning it into a sweatshop."

Marketers still aren't getting AI training

If you're worried you're falling behind in the AI 'race', if you're doing anything structured at all, you're probably doing alright. The Marketing AI Institute survey, which skews to content marketers, shows that less than half had any formal training. It’s depressing how little this has shifted since last year.

Getting AI tools without training is like buying a car without a driver’s licence. You could get somewhere, but you may unleash considerable risk to you and the world. I do an AI literacy workshop if you want help shaping your plan.

What I did this quarter by Google

Got 3.5 hours to watch the Google keynote? Slacker! Try this quick 2-minute spin of Google's best bits so far in 2025. Google proves they're a player in the AI space. Let's hope they use AI to start delivering more useful search results.

AI predicts cancer outcomes from selfies

A scientific study shows that this deep learning face analysis tool could predict your biological age to improve cancer prognosis.

SEO is dead? Let's not dig its grave just yet

Interesting LinkedIn chat on how to get ahead with AI search (or try to) with some folks, including Deborah Carver aka The Content Technologist, who really know their onions 🌰

Good content design remains the most likely strategy to win in the shift to more information being served by AI chat than Googling. I've written before about getting ahead of AI bots for thought leadership.

Are we in a post-follower era?

In similar online trends, social media's purpose has shifted. In the old days, we chased followers. Then engagement. Now, most good stuff happens in private chat, what was once called 'dark social'. It’s had a big impact on all our lives, thanks to the ‘Partygate’ UK government scandal with deleted WhatsApp chats and, more recently, Signal groups stacked with bro emojis to discuss sensitive US military operations. If you're growing a brand, you most likely need a mix of these three approaches – some from the brand, some by you and your talent.

AI agents have a problem full stop

RAG (Retrieval augmented-generation) is seen as a solution to rogue AI results by looking up information from your knowledge sources. In theory, this control makes it more reliable, but it needs more crafting to integrate with agentic AI.

TL;DR: most RAG systems push information then stop when they’ve served it up, whereas agents need to prod for questions and actions to move the discussion on to either solve the problem or advance the discussion.

Gen AI makes people more productive but less motivated

HBR reports on a study showing those doing admin and marketing-type tasks with GenAI are more efficient but more bored when doing tasks that need critical thinking unaided. This will be quite some transition.

🚰 Watercooler: The barmy and bluster in big AI hype

Are you Googling ChatGPT like a dad?

Altman claims ChatGPT users have different use cases depending on age: younger folks use it for life advice, older folks as a search engine. I'm feeling seen. And old.

There were alarmist reactions that the data shows young people use the app as a confidante, feeding it intimate information about their thoughts and lives. This has a potentially huge impact on data privacy if this data is sold to brands. We've been here, and still are, with social media, so perhaps nothing new. If you're thinking about your AI content strategy, it's worth considering what your demographic uses AI chat for.

And some serious knives out shade for Altman in this dissection of his kitchen and cooking choices in the FT (this feature usually happens in a restaurant so the home cooking is perhaps a power move from the OpenAI Founder). What a load of drizzle. 🔪

Let's replace those pesky AI agents with humans