Are AI agents ready for business use?
Yes for narrow, checkable tasks such as research, triage with suggested actions, internal copilots with citations and document processing, provided permissions are scoped and irreversible actions need human approval. Fully autonomous agents on open-ended tasks remain risky.
They are ready for narrow, well-instrumented jobs: triaging and drafting, research and summarisation, data entry with validation, and internal copilots. They are not yet reliable for long, open-ended tasks with irreversible actions and no supervision. The practical pattern is to constrain the tools, validate outputs in code, route uncertain cases to people, log everything and expand autonomy only as evals show the error rate is acceptable.