Are we still hyped, Constantine?
Good morning, Caroline, and great to see you.
We are definitely in a hype cycle, and yet we're not really focused on the 2024
hype cycle or even 2025. We're focused on the very long term, and
artificial intelligence is a very big

and very important macro trend, akin
really to the industrial revolution. And so that's a trend we have been
investing in for decades and are going to continue investing in for decades to
come, regardless of where the hype lands. When you wrote a piece a year or so ago
really identifying how Gartner, for

example, sees hype cycles and its wild
enthusiasm, and then suddenly you get into this disappointment, sort of a
trough of disillusionment. Where are we in terms of consumer
adoption, in terms of people actually putting return on investment first?

You're exactly right.
Let me give a couple of examples. It changes over time.
When I was an AI researcher a long time ago, we were barely scratching the
surface of natural language processing and natural language understanding and
the beginnings of computer vision.

2020 to 2023 were really about large
language models and answering questions. And really the advent of modern AI in
2024 has been the year of agents. And what an agent is, is an AI that
actually completes a task.

You ask it to do something and it just
doesn't just tell you how to do it, it does it for you.
An example of an agent company is our own portfolio company,
Expos. Expos was founded by the creator of GitHub Copilot, and they set out to
create an agent for cybersecurity, an

extremely challenging and important space. And in a few months, they were able to develop an AI that can actually outperform some of the best penetration testers in the world. So this AI goes in and attacks a website, with the permission of the

website provider, finds vulnerabilities and actually reports it back and says, 'We have found these vulnerabilities. We've completed this entire task.' That was 2024. For AI, it was all about agents. 2025 and beyond will likely be about swarms of agents, networks of agents,

them working together and maybe even against each other to achieve some result exceeding the sum of the agents. I feel there's a swarm of companies talking about agents. We're about to have Salesforce numbers after the bell today, and they're all about agent force at the same time.

We recently had one of your portfolio companies on, Rocks, for example, which is also all about agents. How are we going to see them cross-contaminate, work against each other, or in seed? Some win and some lose.

MM: Absolutely. The reason why people are so excited about agents is because the promise of AI completing tasks—not every task, but many tasks—is so impactful. We really want to be able to do the work you just mentioned.

Rocks is a great example of a company that is an agent, but an agent that actually includes the human in the loop. Rocks is not trying to cut the person out. They're actually trying to say, 'Okay, you are a really good seller. You have really good human relationships,

with your buyers. Instead of trying to disintermediate that, we're going to empower you with an agent. This agent's going to do all the work and research for you. It's going to get you prepared for that next meeting.

And an example of them actually putting that theory into practice is they originally developed a technology that would auto-draft emails, and they actually had the ability to auto-send those emails. But they took that out and they found that when they actually kept the human

seller in the loop, performance was 333 times as high. So there are companies where the agent's going to do the entire task; they are likely in the cybersecurity space. Like with XPO, there are companies where their agents are going to do work for the person in order to augment them.

Like in the case of Rox Constantine, you're a big thinker and you put out sort of trends and forecasts—trends for us: how many agent offerings we really need, how many public and private companies, how many courses such as Rox can you back? Well, it's just the beginning and early

days for artificial intelligence. And look, the constraint is really our creativity. The amount of opportunity for artificial intelligence is huge. And I'll give an example. Two areas that are critical to all of us are health care and education. They have been areas where cost has gone up and up and up for decades, and a lot

of the reason for that cost increase is because of the cost of services. Right now, I can actually complete some tasks. I really think that I can come in and, in the coming decades—not just the coming year, but in the coming decades—be a hero for those industries, drive down

costs and actually help us have a better educated, healthier population. So really, the sky's the limit for artificial intelligence and for agents and for networks of AI.

Why 2025 Will Be The Year of AI Agents

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Why 2025 Will Be The Year of AI Agents

Why 2025 Will Be The Year of AI Agents

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