AI Agents for Retail Banking – Not yet!

If you work in banking, chances are you're getting non-stop offers about AI Agents, the latest buzzword in Artificial Intelligence: AI Agents will supposedly replace human workers in doing complex tasks. It's not yet clear what this AI Agent will do for you, but it's allegedly ready to follow instructions to go off and book your holiday, and then go off and independently navigate websites, book a hotel and flight, and gather all of the tickets together ready for travel. (Presumably these AI agents are able to tick the 'I am not a robot' boxes on these websites?) The problem is that no-one really knows exactly what an AI Agent is or how it will do this. Even a16z, a leading investor in and booster of AI Agents is not certain. "For an AI to become a true human worker replacement, there are significant technical issues to solve, such as persistent long-term memory (and costs associated with that), and stomping out hallucinations," writes Techcrunch of a recent a16z podcast discussion. "Because no company wants to hire an employee -- human or artificial -- who can't remember a previous conversation and who also randomly lies. During the podcast, the a16z trio did land on a solid definition of what's possible today. As Li described, an AI agent is a reasoning, multi-step LLM with a dynamic decision tree." In other words, an AI agent would have to be close in power to AGI or Artificial General Intelligence, which most people say does not yet exist. There's a related question. How much energy will these AI Agents of the future consume?