"For many months now, AI companies have made a huge deal out of "AI agents," meaning autonomous software systems that can make decisions and take actions on behalf of humans with minimal intervention. But when that ambitious vision will turn into a reality remains anybody's guess. The current crop of agentic AI models is still getting easily tripped up, often requiring humans to jump in, effectively undercutting their purpose."
"The numbers remain dismal. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found earlier this year that even the best-performing AI agent, which was Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro at the time, failed to complete real-world office tasks 70 percent of the time. And this summer, OpenAI released its ChatGPT agent, promising that it can "do work for you using its own computer, handling complex tasks from start to finish." But in reality, users found the experience lackluster, calling it " not very useful," " shaky," and " slow.""
"As such, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that Microsoft is struggling to sell its enterprise clients on its own take on agentic AI. As The Information reports, the company's Azure salespeople are seriously struggling to meet some extremely ambitious sales growth targets, cutting quotas by up to 50 percent earlier this year. Microsoft's stock sank over 2.5 percent on Wednesday, showing that investors are unimpressed by the tepid sales results. Meanwhile, the tech giant went into damage control mode, with a spokesperson telling Bloomberg in a statement that " The Information 's story inaccurately combines the concepts of growth and sales quotas" and that "aggregate sales quotas for AI products have not been lowered.""
AI agents are presented as autonomous systems that can act on behalf of humans with minimal intervention. Current agentic models often fail and frequently require human intervention, undermining autonomy. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon found top agents failed to complete real-world office tasks about 70 percent of the time. OpenAI's ChatGPT agent promised end-to-end task handling but delivered a lackluster, slow, and shaky user experience. Microsoft is encountering weak enterprise traction for agentic offerings, prompting quota adjustments and investor concern, while the company disputes that aggregate sales quotas for AI products were lowered. Enterprise customers remain unconvinced of agent readiness.
Read at Futurism
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