2025 was supposed to be the year of the AI agent, right? Not quite, acknowledge Google Cloud and Replit — two big players in the AI agent space and partners in the “vibe coding” movement — at a recent VB Impact Series event.Even as they build out agentic tools themselves, leaders from the two companies say the capabilities aren’t quite there yet. This constrained reality comes down to struggles with legacy workflows, fragmented data, and immature governance models. Also, enterprises fundamentally misunderstand that agents aren’t like other technologies: They require a fundamental rethink and reworking of workflows and processes. When enterprises are building agents to automate work, “most of them are toy examples,” Amjad Masad, CEO and founder of Replit, said during the event. “They get excited, but when they start rolling it out, it’s not really working very well.”Building agents based on Replit’s own mistakesReliability and integration, rather than intelligence itself, are two primary barriers to AI agent success, Masad noted. Agents frequently fail when run for extended periods, accumulate errors, or lack access to clean, well-structured data. The problem with enterprise data is it’s messy — it’s structured, unstructured, and stored all over the place — and crawling it is a challenge. Added to that, there are many unwritten things that people do that are difficult to encode in agents, Masad said. “The idea that companies are just going to turn on agents and agents will replace workers or do workflow automations automatically, it’s just not the case today,” he said. “The tooling is not there.” Going beyond agents are computer use tools, which can take over a user’s workspace for basic tasks like web browsing. But these are still in their infancy and can be buggy, u …
