Who understands the work?
An AI agent isn’t a chatbot.
A chatbot answers.
An agent does the work.
It files. It books. It reconciles. It follows up. It checks the status. It clicks the buttons you used to click.
That’s a different category of software. Not advice. Labor.
Right now, most of that labor lives in one place: coding.
Engineers letting agents write code for engineers.
Clean environment. Reversible mistakes. Digital from start to finish.
Of course it started there.
But outside of software?
Hospitals still drown in insurance approvals and reimbursement disputes. Cities still process permits through layered reviews. Customs brokers still chase documents across borders. Small manufacturers still manage supply chains inside spreadsheets.
The agent market looks crowded because we’re staring at the cleanest corner of it.
It’s like judging the internet in 1998 by counting personal websites.
The real shift didn’t come from websites.
It came from software embedded inside industries—payroll, payments, CRM, logistics.
The messy parts.
Agents are at that moment.
Horizontal tools are loud. Vertical operators are quiet.
An agent that manages insurance approvals and reimbursement inside one hospital is more valuable than one that summarizes PDFs.
An agent that understands how one region clears cross-border shipments is more defensible than one that drafts generic emails.
The frontier isn’t more intelligence.
It’s understanding.
The question isn’t whether agents will replace work.
It’s who will teach them how the work actually works.
