In Silicon Valley, no label has caught on faster or become more nebulous than “AI agent.” The term is now affixed to products ranging from LLM chat interfaces to autonomous workflow systems, and its ambiguity is quickly becoming part of its appeal. Yet behind the marketing sheen, some of the industry's leading voices are starting to ask a harder question: what are we really talking about?
“If you look closely, most of what’s being branded as agents today is pretty thin,” said Guido Appenzeller, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “It might just be a clever prompt stacked on top of a knowledge base.” In other words: what passes for an “agent” in 2025 might, in a different year, just be called software.
Appenzeller’s take is blunt, but not isolated. On a recent episode of the firm’s podcast, his colleagues Matt Bornstein and Yoko Li joined him in unpacking the growing disconnect between the term’s use and its substance. From vague product demos to inflated pricing models, their conclusion was clear: most agents aren’t actually agentic.
