AI Hype vs. Reality: Why Most People Aren’t Using AI Agents (Yet)
I love productivity apps and I am a big fan of AI. I am using AI to help me make this post better by giving me feedback. I am currently wearing glasses with AI baked inside of them. I am not an AI hater, but I feel like AI is forced into everything and many times without it having a really good functionality and I feel like a lot of content creators try to hype it up without ever adressing the issues because they want to gain a lot of views ( I am not saying that everyone does this.) All the founders will protect AI because they have all their money tied into it. But there are issues as well as huge concerns like the envoirmental inpact, privacy and deepfakes. I am not even going to focus on those issues. What I am going to focus on is the fact that a lot of the AI workflows and agents everyone seems to be talking about mainly exsist in the productivity world and it is not something people are actually thinking about or using.
Let me give you an example. I have watched so many videos on claude cowork. I have not tested it because 100 USD is a lot of money, but I have tested out craft agents which is similar. They are amazing tools and as a productivity enthusiast I see so many automations and ideas. I see so many use cases for it. But when I try to explain to my friends and family members. Not my parents but the people on my age even those who are a little intrested in tech gadget they dont understand it. Agents can use you files locally I try to explain just to hear back that they only use the browsers. I will come back to AI browsers later in this post. But the point I am trying to make is that a tool that relies on you using markdown files in a folder and connecting that to an AI agent is to complicated. I can not even get my sister or fiance to test a note taking app. Let alone download AI agents.
The point of this is not to say that this is not amazing and that it will not improve. I am sure it will improve and I think that this is a preview of what the future will look like. I think AI that is involved in our work like a real assistant I can intreact with in natural language is the future. What excatly that will look like I am not sure about, but I am sure that it will not look the way it does right now. What I am trying to say with all of this is that AI is the future, but the current itteration is not and people trying to sell it as if you do not learn Claude cowork or to use AI agents you will struggle to get a job in three years. My father was not one of the first people on the internet and he still has a job. My parents in law were not the first people to get a computer but they still survived. Most people I know picked up technologies as they started to mature a little and where ready for mass adoption. Currently what most people think about when I say AI is chatgpt and if you are lucky they may have heard of Gemini and claude. Claude cowork is a great way of trying to make AI into a product, but it is not ready for everyone to use yet. It is mostly in the productivity space we are really hyped about it.
If you go back a year or so all everyone talked about was AI browsers. For the last two-three months I have not seen anything in my feed about AI browsers. The hype just dissapeared and it moved to claude cowork and this new generation of AI agents. I actually believe in AI agents and AI that can do things for you inside of your apps. That is one of the reasons I have been such a big fan of Raycast and what they are doing with AI. I was also a fan of AI browsers until I figured out that I could probably do it faster if I just did it myself, not to mention issues like prompt injecting and hallusinations that AI struggles with. If I ask my AI agent for a ticket to Australia and it sends me to Austria I will quickly have an issue.
Some of these issues are actually hard to fix as well and as long as I have to double check everything important AI does it will be hard to rely on it. If I can not trust it AI will not be something I am willing to pay a lot of money for. Which brings me to my next point. AI costs a lot of money. It is expensive and that is not something they have solved it, my guess is that they will at some point an But right now they are still burning money.
What I am trying to say with this post is not that AI is bad, claude cowork does not work or AI browsers are not the future. What I am trying to say is that if you are struggling to keep up and you almost feel like you need a little break from AI that is okay. AI is still in that early adopter phase and there are benefits and oppertunities to adopting it early. For example there are a lot of great products that need to be built on the top of the foundation that AI has created. I think getting into AI early is a good thing, but it is not the end of the world if you are not early into AI and for those of us who are we will continue to learn new things as AI develops. First I had to learn prompting and promt engeneering was the thing. Now it is AI automations. We do not know what AI will do to our society, to productivity and to knowledge work. We just know that it is going to change things. So do not fall for all of the content out there telling you that your life is over if you do not learn AI right now. Learn it at your pace and know that the AI you are seeing today or the large language models which everyone calls AI will not be the AI of the future.
For those of us really into tech and productivity these are fun times. We get to test out and explore and have a lot of fun with AI and all of the ideas that come with it. Currently a lot of the AI products are at an early stage and they are early adopter products and we are early adtopers. All this to say dont be scared if you feel like you are falling behind. It is all a marketing trick and those of us who spend all our time testing out AI apps used to spend all our time testing out other tech before. For some it was phones for me it was productivity apps and now it is all AI.
