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  • Why 2025 Will Be The Year of AI Agents

Why 2025 Will Be The Year of AI Agents

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Bloomberg Dec 4, 2024 04:20 · 18.5k Views

While AI agents dominated the conversation in 2024, Konstantine Buhler of Sequoia Capital says "swarms" or networks of AI agents will be the theme come 2025. He joins Caroline Hyde to discuss on "Bloomberg Technology."

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Transcript

  • 00:00 Are we still hyped, Constantine?
  • 00:03 Good morning, Caroline, and great to see you.
  • 00:06 We are definitely in an AI hype cycle.
  • 00:09 And yet we're not really focused on the 2024 hype cycle or even 2025.
  • 00:14 We're focused on the very long term.
  • 00:16 And artificial intelligence is a very big and very important macro trend
  • 00:21 akin really to the industrial revolution.
  • 00:24 And so that's the trend we have been investing in for decades and are going to continue investing in for decades to come, regardless of where hype lands.
  • 00:31 When you wrote a piece
  • 00:33 year or so ago really identifying how Gartner, for example, sees hype cycles and this wild enthusiasm and then suddenly you get into this disappointment, sort of a through of disillusionment.
  • 00:44 Where are we in terms of consumer adoption, in terms of
  • 00:47 people actually putting return on investment, AI investment first?
  • 00:53 You're exactly right.
  • 00:54 Let me give a couple examples.
  • 00:56 AI changes over time.
  • 00:58 When I was an AI researcher a long time ago, we were
  • 01:01 barely scratching the surface of
  • 01:04 natural language processing and natural language understanding and the beginnings of computer vision
  • 01:09 2022-2023.
  • 01:11 We're really about large language models and
  • 01:14 answering questions and,
  • 01:15 and really the advent
  • 01:17 of
  • 01:18 a modern AI.
  • 01:19 2024 has been the year of agents
  • 01:22 and, and what an agent is,
  • 01:24 is an AI that actually completes a task.
  • 01:27 You ask it to do something and it doesn't doesn't just tell you how to do it, it does it for you.
  • 01:33 An example of an AI agent company
  • 01:35 is our own portfolio company, Expo.
  • 01:38 Expo was founded by the creator of GitHub Copilot
  • 01:42 and they set out to create an agent for cybersecurity.
  • 01:46 Extremely challenging and important space.
  • 01:49 And
  • 01:49 in a few months they were able to develop an AI
  • 01:52 that can actually outperform some of the best penetration testers in the world.
  • 01:57 So this AI goes in and it attacks a website with the permission of the website provider, finds vulnerabilities
  • 02:03 and actually reports it back and says we have found these vulnerabilities.
  • 02:07 We've completed this entire task.
  • 02:09 That was 2024 for AI.
  • 02:11 It was all about agents.
  • 02:13 2025 and beyond
  • 02:15 likely will be about swarms of AI agents, networks of AI agents, them working together and maybe even against each other
  • 02:22 to some result.
  • 02:25 The swarm of AI agents.
  • 02:27 I feel there's a swarm of companies talking about AI agents that we're about to have Salesforce numbers after the bell today, and they're all about agent force.
  • 02:34 At the same time, we recently had one of your portfolio companies on rocks, for example, which is also all about agents.
  • 02:40 How
  • 02:40 are we going to see them
  • 02:42 cross contaminate work against each other or in seen some win and some lose.
  • 02:48 Absolutely.
  • 02:48 The reason why people are so excited about agents
  • 02:51 is because the promise of AI completing tasks.
  • 02:54 Not every task, but many tasks.
  • 02:57 It is so impactful.
  • 02:58 We really want AI to be able to do the work.
  • 03:01 You just mentioned Rocks
  • 03:02 and rocks is a great example of a, a company that
  • 03:06 is an AI agent,
  • 03:07 but an AI agent that actually includes the human in the loop.
  • 03:10 Rocks is not trying to cut the person out.
  • 03:13 They're actually trying to say, OK, you are a really good seller.
  • 03:16 You have really good human relationships with your buyers.
  • 03:20 Instead of trying to disintermediate that,
  • 03:22 we're going to empower you with an agent.
  • 03:24 This agents going to do all the work and research for you.
  • 03:27 It's going to get you prepared for that next meeting.
  • 03:29 And an example of them actually putting that theory into practice is they originally developed a technology that would auto draft emails
  • 03:38 and they actually had the ability to auto send those emails,
  • 03:41 but they took that out
  • 03:43 and they found that when they actually kept the human seller in the loop,
  • 03:46 performance was 333 times as high.
  • 03:49 So there are companies where the agents going to do the entire task,
  • 03:54 likely in the cybersecurity space, like with Expo, there are companies where their AI agents going to do work for the person
  • 04:01 in order to
  • 04:02 augment them.
  • 04:03 Like in the case of Rocks Constantine,
  • 04:05 you're a big thinker and you
  • 04:06 put out sort of
  • 04:08 trends and forecasts
  • 04:10 trends for us.
  • 04:10 How many
  • 04:11 agent offerings we really need?
  • 04:13 How many public and private companies?
  • 04:15 How many
  • 04:16 horses such as Rocks can you back?
  • 04:19 Well,
  • 04:19 it's just the beginning and early days for artificial intelligence.
  • 04:23 And
  • 04:24 look,
  • 04:25 the, the constraint is really our creativity.
  • 04:28 The amount of
  • 04:29 opportunity for artificial intelligence is huge.
  • 04:31 And I'll give an example,
  • 04:33 2 areas that are critical to
  • 04:36 all of us
  • 04:37 are healthcare and education.
  • 04:39 They have been areas where cost has gone up and up and up for decades.
  • 04:43 And a lot of reason for that cost increase is because of the cost of services.
  • 04:47 Now that AI can actually
  • 04:49 complete some tasks,
  • 04:51 I really think that AI can come in and in the coming decades, not just the coming year,
  • 04:55 but in the coming decades, be a hero for those industries, Drive down costs.
  • 05:00 And actually help us have a better educated, healthier population.
  • 05:04 So really, the sky is the limit for artificial intelligence
  • 05:07 and for AI agents
  • 05:09 and for networks of AI.