Anthony Bay has seen it all in the tech world for nearly four decades, and he has some advice for those who fret that artificial intelligence (AI) agents haven’t caught on fast enough: Patience.
“These revolutions happen very slowly, and then they go vertically and take off,” said Bay, who has experienced the gamut of technological landmarks up close, from personal computers in the 1980s to the internet (’90s), mobile devices (2000s), cloud computing (2010s) and now generative AI (2020s).
“I think of the current climate with agentic AI is comparable to the internet in 1996,” said Bay, a former executive at Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. who is now a partner at Techquity, a collective of builders, operators and leaders from the world’s top tech companies who help investors, CEOs and boards.
“It took a couple years for the hype around the internet to catch on and become a reality in the market,” Bay said in a video interview. “The same thing will apply to AI, whether generative, agentic, or some other form.”
Bay’s take is echoed by Lyle Pratt, CEO of Vida AI, a voice AI agent that is quickly gaining steam.
“Hype and all sorts of announcements happened before the internet took off, and the same thing is happening with AI,” Pratt said in a video interview. “Remember when every business needed a website but few did? That eventually changed — and the same will apply to AI agents. Businesses are just getting a bearing on how to use AI, and they like the results so far.”
“I think of voice agents as the new website. There is a similar adoption wave to what happened in the early 2000s with the internet,” said Pratt, who estimates the voice AI agent market at about $500 billion.
What Bay and Pratt are saying is that what presumably is holding back agentic AI adoption at some enterprises — infrastructure readiness, operational complexity, training and IT budget uncertainty — were similarly in play for previous technology waves. Eventually, those obstacles, too, melted away and adoption accelerated like a rocket ship.
The explosion of large language models (LLMs) and advances in reasoning models from OpenAI, DeepSeek, Google, Anthropic and others — coupled with a wave of specialized AI agents from Microsoft, Salesforce Inc., ServiceNow Inc., Adobe Inc., SAP and Atlassian Corp., to name but a few — are increasingly creating a sea change.
Indeed, an eye-popping 91% of executives worldwide said they are actively ramping up AI adoption and use, and 74% believe it is critical to their company’s success, according to a Globalization Partners (G-P) annual AI at Work report. Even more astounding: Only 1% of execs said they are not using AI at all.
“AI is no longer just an experimental technology. It’s become a strategic pillar for companies looking to stay competitive, no matter where they are around the world,” Nat Natarajan, chief product and strategy officer at G-P, said.
The hype over AI agents has reached a molten-lava hot status, as evidenced by a Futurum report that agentic AI will tackle up to $4 trillion worth of human labor globally by 2030, paralleling predictions from NVIDIA Corp. CEO Jensen Huang of a “multitrillion-dollar opportunity” with billions of automated digital workers.
Chief information officers “now prioritize AI-driven automation to replace mundane tasks and augment existing teams with digital labor,” Futurum said. “This shift is far more than a technology refresh. It’s a profound evolution of work itself.”
Bay and Pratt would agree.
“When the internet hit the peak of the S curve, the adoption of websites among businesses jumped from 30% to 80% quickly,” Pratt said. “I think we’re going to see the same with agentic AI in the next few years.”
