AI Agents: New Packaging, Not New Intelligence

In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, a curious shift has occurred. As the exponential progress promised by scaling laws has slowed, the narrative has cleverly pivoted from pure AI capabilities to what AI-powered "agents" can accomplish. This sleight of hand masks a crucial reality: what's being sold as AI advancement is often just standard software tools wrapped in an AI interface.

To understand this disconnect, let's examine something mundane yet illustrative—booking a flight ticket—and why AI agents handling this task don't necessarily represent smarter AI.

The Hype Cycle Returns

Two years ago, in the wake of GPT-4's release, breathless predictions claimed AI would transform industries overnight and trigger mass unemployment. When these predictions failed to materialize, rather than acknowledging the miscalculation, the same voices simply shifted focus. Now AI agents are heralded as the next breakthrough on an inevitable path to artificial general intelligence.

This pattern should feel familiar. The narrative conveniently evolves to maintain excitement while sidestepping previous overstatements. What's presented as revolutionary progress is often just existing capabilities repackaged in a more marketable form.

The Flight Booking Test Case

Consider booking a flight—a common task with multiple solutions:

You could visit a travel agency, call an airline, use a booking website, access an airline API directly, or employ an AI agent. Each method ultimately accesses the same reservation systems and payment infrastructure. The differences lie in interface, convenience, and reliability.

The AI agent approach often involves a language model triggering browser automation or API calls—essentially mimicking what a human would do on a website, but with less reliability and more computational overhead.

Looking Under the Hood

What makes an AI "agent" work? Typically, three components:

1. A language model that interprets commands and generates text

2. External tools like browser automation, APIs, or search engines

3. Integration code connecting the LLM to these external tools

Notice something important: the language model itself isn't doing anything fundamentally different from standard text generation. The "agent" capabilities come from surrounding it with pre-existing software tools—tools that would function perfectly well without AI involvement.

Tools Don't Equal Intelligence

This leads to a critical insight: equipping an AI with tools doesn't make the AI itself more intelligent. The LLM remains unchanged; it's simply been placed within a system that can translate its outputs into actions via conventional software.

It's like giving someone a remote control—the person hasn't become more capable, they've just been granted access to devices that can execute commands. The intelligence remains static while the range of effects expands.

Moreover, using an LLM to trigger API calls or navigate websites is often inefficient. Traditional software can perform these functions more reliably without the computational cost and unpredictability of language models.

Redefining Progress

True AI advancement would involve fundamental improvements in reasoning, generalization, or efficiency—not merely connecting existing models to more tools. Current agents reflect clever systems engineering, not breakthroughs in artificial intelligence itself.

For businesses and consumers, this distinction matters. When evaluating AI solutions, we should ask whether the AI component adds unique value or if we're simply paying a premium for conventional software functionality dressed in AI clothing.

In many cases, including our flight booking example, dedicated apps or direct API access would provide more consistent results at lower cost than an AI agent approach.

The next time you hear about impressive AI agent capabilities, remember to ask: Is this demonstrating smarter AI, or just standard tools with an AI interface? The answer will help cut through the hype and identify where genuine innovation is occurring in this important field.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​