The Agent Scorecard

⏱️ Your Morning Brief (TL;DR)

Welcome back!

If you’re new around here, we translate 37-page consultant reports into actionable 5-minute reads.

This week, we unpack a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report on the evolution of AI Agents.

The report gets into the shift from pre-defined workflow style Agents to more Autonomous Agents.

Here’s what to expect in this weeks newsletter:

• A breakdown of the AI Agent evolution

• What AI Agent use cases are hitting the mark

• How reliable and effective are AI Agents today?

• 6 factors for evaluating Agent effectiveness

• 7 interesting reads

Let’s dive in 🤖

 💡 This Week’s Deep Dive

The quickly evolving capabilities of AI Agents is driven by continuous improvements in AI models, improving performance, reasoning, and increased modalities at lower costs.

The AI Agent Evolution

We’re quickly moving beyond simple models and chatbots towards autonomous agents.

What’s the difference? Autonomous Agents are models trained to observe, reason, plan, use tools, and use resources to act on provided goal.

We’ll start seeing Multi-Agent Systems when models communicate, share, and coordinate plans to achieve a set of goals.

Where are AI Agents being used the most?

A few types of AI Agents are already finding product-market-fit.

• Coding agents are among the first to reach this point, accelerating software time to market.

• Compliance agents at Bloomberg, which rigorously check facts, catch edge-case risks, and minimize costly mistakes, leading to a 30-50% reduction in time-to-decision

• Research agents at Brightwave, capable of turning large volumes of legal and financial text into concise takeaways, cross-referencing diverse data sources in real-time, and continuously refining their output

Organizations are already getting value from agents in areas like compliance checking, developer time reclamation, and research analysis. Companies are seeing benefits like reduced time-to-decision, decreased cycle times, cost reduction, speed of execution, and improved productivity.

How reliable are AI Agents?

Benchmarks are shifting to measure how well agents use tools and handle end-to-end tasks over time within different domains.

The best models today can reliably complete tasks taking human experts up to a few minutes.

But this is improving quickly. Today, AI Agents can reach ‘1h’ of automation, and it’s doubling every 7 months.

Agents are on their path to handling month-long projects on their own by the end of the decade based on this trajectory.

GPTLDR Takeaways

• Pace of progress: The capability of AI is doubling every ~7 months, maintain a pulse on technology changes while consistently experimenting.

• From chatbot to colleague: As Agents get future introduced into your workforce, expect your org structure to evolve (covered last week), start considering AI as a colleague and your ICs becoming Agent Managers.

• Early AI Agent winners: Coding, compliance, and research are seeing the most adoption. Find low risk opportunities to give these a shot internally.

📚 Interesting Reads

• Customer First and Agentic AI. Amazon Lays Out Its 2025 Roadmap (Link)

• The Great Lock-In Had Begun: OpenAI’s Coming of Age (Link)

• AI Deployment: Future Outlook (Link)

• 5 Reasons Why Enterprises of All Sizes are Adopting Agentic AI (Link)

• Tech’s Big aAnxiety: Fewer Jobs, Lower Pay, More AI (Link)

• What Are Digital Defense Agents? (Link)

• Why Agentic AI is the Next Wave of Innovation (Link)

🏗️ An Agent Assessment Framework

AI Agents are commonly judged by whether they are right or wrong. BCG offers 6 factors to assess an AI agent and can be sliced into two categories, capability and fit:

How Smartcat Scaled Outreach and Cut Costs

Smartcat’s sales team needed a better way to qualify leads and book demos. By partnering with Synthflow, they deployed Voice AI Agents that increased call engagement, revived cold leads, and reduced booking costs by 70%. The result? More deals closed, and reps focused on what matters most—selling.

Explore the full case

🗳️ This Week’s Poll

 ➜ Until Next Week

With automation capabilities doubling every seven months, getting proactive with your experiments will translate into advantages later on.

Stay curious,
The GPTLDR Team

P.S. - We just launched Monday Briefs, curated reads on AI’s impact to your people, operations, technology and strategy. Check out the first release.