AI agents are having a ‘ChatGPT moment’ as investors look for what’s next after chatbots
Rafael Henrique | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Earlier this year, financial services company Klarna said its artificial intelligence agent, powered by OpenAI, had taken over two-thirds of customer chats and was doing work equivalent to that of 700 full-time agents. That was after just one month of use.
Alexander Kvamme, CEO of customer engagement startup Echo AI, told CNBC that Klarna’s announcement in February may have been the first sign of AI agents “having their ChatGPT moment.”
OpenAI released the ChatGPT chatbot to the public in late 2022, giving the public a taste of how new generative AI chatbots could provide much more thorough, creative and conversational answers to web queries compared with traditional search, which is how consumers sought online information for the prior 25 years. Google, Microsoft and others followed with rival products.
The industry quickly moved past text responses and into AI-generated photos and videos. Now comes the rise of AI agents.
Rather than just providing answers — the realm of chatbots and image generators — agents are built for productivity and to complete tasks. They’re AI tools that are able to make decisions, for better or worse, “without a human in the loop,” Kvamme said.
Grace Isford, a partner at venture firm Lux Capital, said there’s been a “dramatic increase” in interest among tech investors when it comes to startups focused on building AI agents. They’ve collectively raised hundreds of millions of dollars and seen their valuations climb alongside the broader generative AI market.
Generative AI exploded in 2023, with $29.1 billion invested across nearly 700 deals, a more than 260% increase in deal value from a year earlier, according to PitchBook. Meanwhile, the non-AI investing landscape has been in an extended lull for well over two years following record financings during the Covid pandemic.
If 2023 was the year of peak AI hype, 2024 is the year of early deployments.
“It has really been a torrent of innovation that has hit the market since the introduction of ChatGPT,” Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of AI at Work, told CNBC. Microsoft is the biggest backer of OpenAI and has invested billions of dollars on its own generative AI models and products, in addition to the billions it’s poured into the ChatGPT developer.
The term AI agents isn’t neatly defined across the tech sector. Industry experts who spoke to CNBC about the emerging trend generally viewed agents as a step beyond chatbots, in that they’re typically designed for specific business functions and can be customized on the big AI models. Think of J.A.R.V.I.S., Tony Stark’s multifaceted AI assistant from the Marvel Universe.
AI agents are often described as advanced generative AI tools that can do multistep, complex tasks on a user’s behalf and generate their own to-do lists, so that users don’t have to walk them through the process step-by-step.
“An assistant is not just giving you the answer, but automating a series of steps,” said Francois Ajenstat, chief product officer at digital analytics company Amplitude.
How Microsoft and Google are playing
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on an earnings call earlier this year that he wants to offer an AI agent that can complete more and more tasks on a user’s behalf, though there is “a lot of execution ahead.” Executives from Meta and Google have also touted their work in pushing AI assistants to become increasingly productive.
At Google I/O in May, Google announced Project Astra, the company’s latest advancement toward its AI assistant that’s being built by Google’s DeepMind AI unit.
In Google’s demo video, the assistant, using video and audio, was able to help the user remember where they left their glasses, review code and answer questions about an object that it was shown. It’s just a prototype for now, but Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said he hopes to roll it out to users later this year.
The demo came a day after OpenAI showcased a similar audio back-and-forth conversation with ChatGPT, positioning it more as an AI assistant that can function as a conversationalist, language translator, math tutor and co-writer of code.
Microsoft followed at its Build developer conference by announcing a partnership with Cognition AI, which will bring Cognition’s own AI agent, called Devin, to customers. Cognition bills Devin as the “first AI software engineer.”
Devin quickly caused a stir on social media for its ability to handle multistep processes. Instead of just generating simple lines of code, Devin creates a problem-solving process, writes the code, tests it and then ships it.
Martin Kon, operating chief of enterprise AI startup Cohere, said AI agents could start doing work such as booking a plane ticket and expensing it, offering a suggested interest rate on a loan, or emailing a customer about arrival time and updating Salesforce accordingly.
To date, the tools have largely been limited to tasks such as helping write code. At Microsoft’s GitHub, for example, roughly 46% of all code “across all programming languages” was AI-generated, CEO Thomas Dohmke wrote in a blog post in early 2023.
While the line between an AI coding tool and a true AI agent is blurry, most experts who spoke with CNBC said the defining characteristic of an agent is that it goes well beyond a single use case and starts to approach an all-capable personal assistant.
Anthropic and other startups are already working toward that goal. The first step is giving their chatbots the ability to interact with external tools and services on behalf of the customer.
Microsoft’s Spataro said the process of developing his company’s Copilot coding agent has “kind of been like being strapped to a rocketship.” A big part of what Microsoft is doing, he said, is moving from one- or two-step tasks to multistep tasks. That could involve looking at a user’s calendar and giving a 30-second outlook on what to prioritize for the day.
Fred Havemeyer, head of U.S. AI and software research at Macquarie, wrote in a recent note to investors that the firm is looking forward to seeing more AI agents.
“We think agentic AI, which can self-direct towards achieving tasks, will be the tools that unlock the value of GenAI for everyday users,” Havemeyer wrote.
Romain Huet, OpenAI’s head of developer experience, told CNBC that the concept of AI agents came into focus last year, but people quickly realized there was work to be done to make the tools more autonomous.
“We have the models that become more and more powerful, so we can now capture user intent much better than before, but we’re also still pretty early on that journey at building agents,” Huet said.
The big advancement, he said, will be when an AI agent can know your preferences and “take action on your behalf” without you asking.
Startups raise big money
AI agent startups are reeling in hefty piles of cash from investors. They’re not the billion-dollar-plus financings that have been going into the AI model companies, but valuations are still far ahead of business fundamentals.
Adept, which is led by alumni of OpenAI and Google, received a valuation of over $1 billion last year. The company says on its website that its technology “navigates the complexity of software tools so you don’t have to.”
H, a French AI agent startup, raised a $220 million seed round in May from investors including Amazon, Samsung, UiPath and Google ex-CEO Eric Schmidt. Artisan AI, a Y Combinator-backed startup working on AI agents that it bills as “AI employees for enterprise,” recently completed a $7.3 million seed round and says it’s onboarded more than 100 companies so far.
Artisan AI founder and CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack said it wasn’t possible to begin working on true AI agents until 2022 because that’s when chatbots such as ChatGPT first made it possible for the average consumer to interact with such tools.
“People talk about how the VC market is down in general,” Carmichael-Jack said. “But for us it’s like 2021 in AI startups.”
Braden Hancock worked at Facebook Research and Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab before co-founding Snorkel AI in 2019. He said the market is in a “similar hype cycle” to that of self-driving cars. And broader AI agents will similarly take a long time to hit the mainstream, he said.
Hancock said agents must be “many times” better before people are “willing to accept putting something on autopilot.” He added that, when it comes to having technology sign your name and make money transfers on your behalf, “there’s a really high bar.”
Kanjun Qiu’s three-year-old startup, Imbue, has been valued at more than $1 billion, with backing from Amazon’s Alexa Fund and Eric Schmidt. Based on the company’s own user research, Qiu said the current characterization of AI agents — as generally intelligent personal assistants that handle delegated tasks — is not what users actually want, since, by design, they’re “not fully trustworthy.”
“Even as CEO, it’s hard for me to delegate things to my executive assistant,” Qiu said. “I’ve had her for two years, and she’s amazing.” For new things, Qiu said, “It’s still hard for me to fully know, ‘Okay, is this going to come back the way I expected?'”
Imbue is developing ways for people to make their own AI software agents — without coding — to run in the background for their personalized needs, whether it’s creating a way to track the news or building a bot to book travel. These types of AI models wouldn’t need to train on user data, since each use case would be personalized.
Instead of delegating tasks to an agent built by the likes of OpenAI or Google, which would be centralized and controlled by those companies, Imbue imagines agents putting control in the hands of users.
“There’s a way of thinking about agents as enabling every person to make software,” Qiu said. The user is “asking the agent to write code on the computer, to make the computer do what I want to do.”
An employee walks past a quilt displaying Etsy Inc. signage at the company’s headquarters in the Brooklyn.
Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Etsy is trying to make it easier for shoppers to purchase products from local merchants and avoid the extra cost of imports as President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs raise concerns about soaring prices.
In a post to Etsy’s website on Thursday, CEO Josh Silverman said the company is “surfacing new ways for buyers to discover businesses in their countries” via shopping pages and by featuring local sellers on its website and app.
“While we continue to nurture and enable cross-border trade on Etsy, we understand that people are increasingly interested in shopping domestically,” Silverman said.
Etsy operates an online marketplace that connects buyers and sellers with mostly artisanal and handcrafted goods. The site, which had 5.6 million active sellers as of the end of December, competes with e-commerce juggernaut Amazon, as well as newer entrants that have ties to China like Temu, Shein and TikTok Shop.
By highlighting local sellers, Etsy could relieve some shoppers from having to pay higher prices induced by President Trump’s widespread tariffs on trade partners. Trump has imposed tariffs on most foreign countries, with China facing a rate of 145%, and other nations facing 10% rates after he instituted a 90-day pause to allow for negotiations. Trump also signed an executive order that will end the de minimis provision, a loophole for low-value shipments often used by online businesses, on May 2.
Temu and Shein have already announced they plan to raise prices late next week in response to the tariffs. Sellers on Amazon’s third-party marketplace, many of whom source their products from China, have said they’re considering raising prices.
Silverman said Etsy has provided guidance for its sellers to help them “run their businesses with as little disruption as possible” in the wake of tariffs and changes to the de minimis exemption.
Before Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs took effect, Silverman said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in late February that he expects Etsy to benefit from the tariffs and de minimis restrictions because it “has much less dependence on products coming in from China.”
“We’re doing whatever work we can do to anticipate and prepare for come what may,” Silverman said at the time. “In general, though, I think Etsy will be more resilient than many of our competitors in these situations.”
Still, American shoppers may face higher prices on Etsy as U.S. businesses that source their products or components from China pass some of those costs on to consumers.
Etsy shares are down 17% this year, slightly more than the Nasdaq.
WATCH: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says sellers will pass cost of tariffs on to consumers
Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies before the House Judiciary Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building on December 11, 2018 in Washington, DC.
Alex Wong | Getty Images
Google’s antitrust woes are continuing to mount, just as the company tries to brace for a future dominated by artificial intelligence.
On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that Google held illegal monopolies in online advertising markets due to its position between ad buyers and sellers.
The ruling, which followed a September trial in Alexandria, Virginia, represents a second major antitrust blow for Google in under a year. In August, a judge determined the company has held a monopoly in its core market of internet search, the most-significant antitrust ruling in the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago.
Google is in a particularly precarious spot as it tries to simultaneously defend its primary business in court while fending off an onslaught of new competition due to the emergence of generative AI, most notably OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which offers users alternative ways to search for information. Revenue growth has cooled in recent years, and Google also now faces the added potential of a slowdown in ad spending due to economic concerns from President Donald Trump’s sweeping new tariffs.
Parent company Alphabet reports first-quarter results next week. Alphabet’s stock price dipped more than 1% on Thursday and is now down 20% this year.
In Thursday’s ruling, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said Google’s anticompetitive practices “substantially harmed” publishers and users on the web. The trial featured 39 live witnesses, depositions from an additional 20 witnesses and hundreds of exhibits.
Judge Brinkema ruled that Google unlawfully controls two of the three parts of the advertising technology market: the publisher ad server market and ad exchange market. Brinkema dismissed the third part of the case, determining that tools used for general display advertising can’t clearly be defined as Google’s own market. In particular, the judge cited the purchases of DoubleClick and Admeld and said the government failed to show those “acquisitions were anticompetitive.”
“We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president or regulatory affairs, said in an emailed statement. “We disagree with the Court’s decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a press release from the DOJ that the ruling represents a “landmark victory in the ongoing fight to stop Google from monopolizing the digital public square.”
Potential ad disruption
If regulators force the company to divest parts of the ad-tech business, as the Justice Department has requested, it could open up opportunities for smaller players and other competitors to fill the void and snap up valuable market share. Amazon has been growing its ad business in recent years.
Meanwhile, Google is still defending itself against claims that its search has acted as a monopoly by creating strong barriers to entry and a feedback loop that sustained its dominance. Google said in August, immediately after the search case ruling, that it would appeal, meaning the matter can play out in court for years even after the remedies are determined.
The remedies trial, which will lay out the consequences, begins next week. The Justice Department is aiming for a break up of Google’s Chrome browser and eliminating exclusive agreements, like its deal with Apple for search on iPhones. The judge is expected to make the ruling by August.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai (L) and Apple CEO Tim Cook (R) listen as U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a roundtable with American and Indian business leaders in the East Room of the White House on June 23, 2023 in Washington, DC.
Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images
After the ad market ruling on Thursday, Gartner’s Andrew Frank said Google’s “conflicts of interest” are apparent by how the market runs.
“The structure has been decades in the making,” Frank said, adding that “untangling that would be a significant challenge, particularly since lawyers don’t tend to be system architects.”
However, the uncertainty that comes with a potentially years-long appeals process means many publishers and advertisers will be waiting to see how things shake out before making any big decisions given how much they rely on Google’s technology.
“Google will have incentives to encourage more competition possibly by loosening certain restrictions on certain media it controls, YouTube being one of them,” Frank said. “Those kind of incentives may create opportunities for other publishers or ad tech players.”
A date for the remedies trial hasn’t been set.
Damian Rollison, senior director of market insights for marketing platform Soci, said the revenue hit from the ad market case could be more dramatic than the impact from the search case.
“The company stands to lose a lot more in material terms if its ad business, long its main source of revenue, is broken up,” Rollison said in an email. “Whereas divisions like Chrome are more strategically important.”
WATCH: U.S. judge finds Google holds illegal online ad-tech monopolies
Jason Citron, CEO of Discord in Washington, DC, on January 31, 2024.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds | AFP | Getty Images
The New Jersey attorney general sued Discord on Thursday, alleging that the company misled consumers about child safety features on the gaming-centric social messaging app.
The lawsuit, filed in the New Jersey Superior Court by Attorney General Matthew Platkin and the state’s division of consumer affairs, alleges that Discord violated the state’s consumer fraud laws.
Discord did so, the complaint said, by allegedly “misleading children and parents from New Jersey” about safety features, “obscuring” the risks children face on the platform and failing to enforce its minimum age requirement.
“Discord’s strategy of employing difficult to navigate and ambiguous safety settings to lull parents and children into a false sense of safety, when Discord knew well that children on the Application were being targeted and exploited, are unconscionable and/or abusive commercial acts or practices,” lawyers wrote in the legal filing.
They alleged that Discord’s acts and practices were “offensive to public policy.”
A Discord spokesperson said in a statement that the company disputes the allegations and that it is “proud of our continuous efforts and investments in features and tools that help make Discord safer.”
“Given our engagement with the Attorney General’s office, we are surprised by the announcement that New Jersey has filed an action against Discord today,” the spokesperson said.
One of the lawsuit’s allegations centers around Discord’s age-verification process, which the plaintiffs believe is flawed, writing that children under thirteen can easily lie about their age to bypass the app’s minimum age requirement.
The lawsuit also alleges that Discord misled parents to believe that its so-called Safe Direct Messaging feature “was designed to automatically scan and delete all private messages containing explicit media content.” The lawyers claim that Discord misrepresented the efficacy of that safety tool.
“By default, direct messages between ‘friends’ were not scanned at all,” the complaint stated. “But even when Safe Direct Messaging filters were enabled, children were still exposed to child sexual abuse material, videos depicting violence or terror, and other harmful content.”
The New Jersey attorney general is seeking unspecified civil penalties against Discord, according to the complaint.
The filing marks the latest lawsuit brought by various state attorneys general around the country against social media companies.
In 2023, a bipartisan coalition of over 40 state attorneys general sued Meta over allegations that the company knowingly implemented addictive features across apps like Facebook and Instagram that harm the mental well being of children and young adults.
The New Mexico attorney general sued Snap in Sep. 2024 over allegations that Snapchat’s design features have made it easy for predators to easily target children through sextortion schemes.
The following month, a bipartisan group of over a dozen state attorneys general filed lawsuits against TikTok over allegations that the app misleads consumers that its safe for children. In one particular lawsuit filed by the District of Columbia’s attorney general, lawyers allege that the ByteDance-owned app maintains a virtual currency that “substantially harms children” and a livestreaming feature that “exploits them financially.”
In January 2024, executives from Meta, TikTok, Snap, Discord and X were grilled by lawmakers during a senate hearing over allegations that the companies failed to protect children on their respective social media platforms.
WATCH: The FTC has an uphill battle in its antitrust case against Meta.
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