We’re still in the earliest days of artificial intelligence. It was just November 2022 when OpenAI released ChatGPT, and the world changed. However, enough time has passed for us to have a sufficient perspective to categorize AI and autonomous agents into three distinct eras.

Production—2026: The coming year is when we begin to see a real payoff from business investments as innovative organizations take what they’ve learned and seriously embrace AI, embedding agents throughout their operations to realize value.

Introduction—2024: In the initial shockwave, there was more novelty and hype than practicality around the possibilities of AI. Businesses and leaders understandably struggled to understand what was barreling toward them.

Evaluation—2025: There was a reality check for organizations as they began testing, experimenting with, and piloting AI projects in their search for use cases that created value. For various reasons, businesses often failed to achieve the results they expected or sometimes even saw their efforts completely stall. Click here to read the full-text article