The wrong promise
Most AI agent positioning still sounds like a replacement fantasy. That is not a serious buying framework.
The useful frame
An AI agent is helpful when it does one of three things inside a bounded system:
- routes work to the right next step
- drafts a first pass that a human can review quickly
- classifies or summarizes inputs faster than a human should do manually
The critical requirement
If the workflow has no fallback, no audit trail and no way to inspect why the model made a choice, then the agent does not reduce operational risk. It just moves it.