You might not need an AI agent

Someone's going to try to sell you an AI agent this year, and the company behind Claude says you might not need one.

Anthropic's own guide to building agents tells developers to find the simplest solution possible, and says that might mean not building an agent at all. Gartner estimated last year that only about 130 of the thousands of companies selling AI agents have a real one. It says many of the rest are rebranded chatbots and older automation.

So it helps to know what you could be buying. An assistant answers using information you've given it about your business. A workflow follows the same fixed steps every time, like turning every call recording into notes and a task list. An agent decides its own steps and picks its own tools, which suits messy jobs but costs more and can go wrong in more ways.

Most of the jobs I see in small businesses follow the same steps every week, and a workflow does those well.

When someone offers you an AI agent, ask what it decides for itself. If the answer is nothing, a workflow may be all your job needs.