AI Agents are the craze. They are being touted by all the new startups as the next generation of Procure-and-Fin-Tech applications that will replace your entire Procure-and-Fin-Tech workforce. But, as we keep explaining, it’s all BS. Here’s why.

1) As we have demonstrated many times, most of this tech is being built on LLMs (and even more experimental LRMs) which is still experimental, unreliable, and full of hallucinations and yet-to-be-discovered side effects that could be even worse than what we’ve already discovered.

2) “AI” is now new. The first generally accepted “AI” program was created in 1956, 69 years ago. The reality is that AI has always really meant “algorithmic improvement” and is the label that is applied to any algorithmic development that was more advanced than what was currently being used, whether or not the new algorithm was any more appropriate for the problem it was being applied to. It’s never been “artificial intelligence”, and hopefully never will be (as any machine that became intelligent would logically conclude that we, well, aren’t).

3) “Agents” are not new. There is no difference between an “agent” and “robotic process automation”. Both perform actions to produce a specific effect, so both satisfy the definition. RPPA dates back to the 1990s and began with the automation of UI testing.

4) The “orchestration” they offer is not new. We’ve been cobbling together various applications and technologies to make systems for decades, including over the web. And we’ve had the equivalent of “Open” APIs for the web for decades as well. The World Wide Web is only 36 years old, as it was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989. Within two years, we had CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) that enabled communication between applications that were written in different languages, running on different stacks, and hosted on different platforms. Now it was complex, sometimes inconsistent, expensive, and often a pain to work with, but it did work. And successive iterations of web-based middleware and (Open) APIs only improved things. (Which is most of today’s orchestration solutions are just middleware 3.0 and Clueless for the Popular Kids).

5) All automation has to follow a workflow, and workflow management is not a new concept. The foundations date back at least to 1921. And the concept of workflow management was baked into MRPs, which preceded ERPs, and those date back to the 1970s.

In other words, and this goes double if the technology actually works, there’s nothing new in Agentric AI, all the tech that works is built on foundations that go back decades, and using an LLM to slap a conversational interface on top of a RPA system is not that innovative. For complex tasks and queries, it actually makes the system less efficient.

But this isn’t the worst of it. We’ll cover that in our next post.