After years of chatbots, the industry is pivoting to agents — systems that take actions in the world rather than just generating text.
**What's shipping:**
- Cursor/Devin: autonomous software engineering
- Operator (OpenAI): web browser control
- Claude's computer use: clicking, typing on real desktops
- Perplexity: deep research with citations
**The promise:** Give an agent a goal ('research competitors, write a report'), it executes over hours without supervision.
**The reality check:** Current agents fail often on complex multi-step tasks. Reliability is the unsolved problem.