AI "agents" are on everyone's lips these days, so it wasn't surprising that the VCs at Fortune's Brainstorm AI conference this week had a lot to say on the topic. One big takeaway: When it comes to the hype, and the fears, of AI agents, investors are still pretty skeptical.
Leigh Marie Braswell, who joined venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins last year to focus on AI infrastructure and machine learning application founders, asserts that “agents don’t work”—at least for now.
“They do not yet work reliably for the vast majority of use cases,” Braswell said during Tuesday's VC panel. Braswell went on to lay out self-driving cars as the prime example. While autonomous vehicles may be out on the streets right now, she said, they still often need humans to step in and either intervene or guide them.
“Yes, agents can really speed you up,” she said, but they require a human in the loop “for basically all of the use cases.”
Union Square Ventures Rebecca Kaden, who also spoke on the panel, chimed in—saying that AI agents may be consistent 80% or 90% of the time, but “we’re not 100% there…Like in any consumer deliverable, the last 5% matters more than anything else, and I think sometimes we're under-weighing how far we are from that last 5% to really happen.”
Sarah Guo, founder and managing partner of the venture firm Conviction, said that while she does think AI agents work, she doesn’t think that agents are replacing jobs yet.
“Most jobs are actually quite complicated, and you require a bunch of guardrails and evaluations to figure out how to make something work in a real context,” Guo said. But she noted how companies in her portfolio are releasing tools where “you can write an application in natural language and deploy it to the world, and it will be a full fledged application with authentication, without a developer.”
All three of the investors seemed to agree that we will eventually get to the point where AI agents are replacing human jobs. But, as Union Square Ventures’ Kaden put it: “We don’t really know how far away we are from that,” she said.
Jessica Mathews
X: @jessicakmathews
Email: jessica.mathews@fortune.com
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