Analysis
Agents
Agents, Finally, Ship
The agent wave was supposed to arrive in 2024. It arrived this spring instead — and it doesn't look like the demos.
By The Memo · Tuesday, June 16, 2026 · 9 min read
Two years ago, agent demos went viral every other week. None of them shipped. The autonomous browser-using, ticket-resolving, code-merging future stayed permanently six months away. So when the agents that actually work started landing this quarter, almost nobody noticed.
The ones that work share three traits, and none of them are the traits the demos optimized for.
The shipped agents don't try to do everything. They live inside one workflow — a CRM, a code review, a customer support queue — and they have real write access to the system around them. The 'general-purpose autonomous agent' is still a research demo. The vertical agent with twelve tools and a tight loop is in production.
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