AI Agents Move From Demo to Deployment, Slowly

The companies with real production usage share one thing: narrow scope.

The details arrived in pieces: a term sheet here, a hiring spree there, and a set of numbers that only make sense once you look at how agents is being priced today.

The interesting number is not the total but the concentration. A handful of buyers and a handful of funds account for most of the movement, which makes the market look healthier in aggregate than it feels from inside a cap table.

Margins are the pressure point. Compute, distribution and support costs all scale with usage, so growth that once looked like leverage now shows up as a line item somebody has to defend quarterly.

Whether this holds depends on the next two funding cycles. If the capital stays, the current pace becomes the baseline; if it thins out, several of these companies will be repriced quickly.

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