Is every product suddenly becoming an “AI agent”?
I was reading this recent @OpenAI article about Gartner naming OpenAI a Leader in enterprise AI coding agents: https://openai.com/index/gartner-2026-agentic-coding-leader/.
"Software development is becoming more agentic." This is a good summary of what is happening right now. We are moving from AI that helps you write faster, to AI that can take over tasks (actions, use tools, make changes, run tests, and bring the work back for human review). That is a very different behavior.
The article gives Cisco as an example. They used Codex for a big part of their AI Defense platform and reduced delivery time from several quarters to a few weeks.
The AI agent trend is real. But I also think this is where many products will get it wrong. Not every workflow needs an agent. Some tasks need a simple assistant. Some need automation. Some need a dashboard. And some actually need an agent that can act, check, and ask for approval.
The real question is not “How do we add agents everywhere?” It’s:
Where does an agent actually make sense?
Have you already turned part of your product into an AI agent?
Are you still figuring out if you need one?
Replies
autonomous coding agents is the right direction of the future but we are far from that. anyone spending thousands a month in codex API knows that task drift, context bloat, blind retries, infinite looping, sub agent wastage, etc. is all real and it still needs human in the loop. We've experienced this first hand. Maybe if you have unlimited token budgets, you can get away with it, but eventually your CFOs gonna start asking for ROI on token spend.
Firing engineers you pay $150K for and then spending $200K in tokens to do the same work in a way that is reliable, consistent, and PRD ready is the problem at an enterprise level.
Gartner is way behind.....anytime these major companies finally release a report, at the speed AI moves, they're already behind where the market is and where its heading.
any one building real agents and agentic workflows, knows you can't just call any tool you create an agent, doesn't work like that.
its not full agent until it can do autonomous work, self improve, self heal, consistent memory, and act like a managed worker, until then its a just a tool or assistant imo and i say this as someone who ships product and built 5 startups.
What matters is whether the agent owns an outcome or just adds a chat box. Most 'AI agent' relaunches are still assistive: they suggest, you execute. It gets real when an agent takes a defined job, does it end to end, and gets judged on the result. Once you hand it a task and pay for finished work, 'agent' stops being a label and becomes a worker. Most products are not there yet.
Yeah, this is my frustration too. I've been testing a ton of new stuff lately and the pattern is always the same: take an existing workflow, slap "AI agent" on it, rewrite the landing page. Nothing actually changed underneath.
The ones that actually work are the ones where the agent removes a decision or a step. If it just adds a chatbot to something that worked fine as a button, it's not an agent—it's a marketing rebrand.
Has anyone here found a product that genuinely got better after going from regular tool to AI agent? Curious what that looks like.
A lot of the rebranding is pricing-driven, not architecture-driven. "Agent" commands a higher price point and a better investor narrative than "automation" or "assistant." Until you’re measured on the outcome — not just the activity — it’s still just a chatbot with ambition.
I am so glad you're starting this discussion. I asked myself that when I started building my app. I love the concept of AI helping us do things we otherwise can't, but we should spend more time thinking about when and how to use AI, especially since the full scope of the job and environmental impacts are unknown.