I’ve been dealing with assistants and AI agents for almost two decades. 

The challenge in adoption was never the tech. 

It’s become easier with LLMs, and yet, business’s have a challenge organizing effectively.

Customer support is a clear ROI because of employing human agents. But the cost in ensuring successful implementations is still high. Cerebral vs visual design - very different UX space.

Other business functions are pretty hit/miss, eg sales or marketing. They dream of a world of assistants but are fragmented internally and not skilled enough to have a great implementation.

Ontologies are hard to align. Data and web services are dated and complex (eg. Networking, business rules, protocols, maintenance). Numerous speed bumps.

All that to say, there is a lot of excitement about AI agents (or assistants), and while I am an optimist, until incentives change, it feels like a couple years at least before any existing brands truly benefit. 

New companies? They’ll see real impact.