Agentic AI, May 2025: From Hype to Production-Ready
Agentic AI—software that can plan, reason, and act with minimal human oversight—moved from concept slide-decks to production roadmaps in May 2025.
Below is a round-up of the month’s most important moves, the signals they send, and a few open questions for builders and investors.
1. Startups Went All-In
“At Y Combinator’s Spring 2025 Demo Day, 70 of 144 startups pitched autonomous agents.”
Agentic themes spanned everything from insurance appeals (Aegis) to robot training via natural language (Mbodi AI).
The takeaway: capital is flowing toward domain-specific agents that own outcomes, not just offer chat interfaces.
2. Enterprises See a Support Revolution Coming
Cisco’s annual services survey predicts that 68 % of all tech-vendor support interactions will be handled by agentic AI by 2028.
Why it matters: budgets for customer experience are rising even as head-count growth stalls. Agentic AI offers the first credible path to “always-on” support without linear staffing costs.
3. Telcos & Cloud Providers Form Strategic Alliances
Ericsson’s Cognitive Network Solutions teamed up with AWS to build self-healing, intent-based autonomous networks.
Telecom networks generate streaming telemetry at petabyte scale—ideal playgrounds for reinforcement-driven agents that can tune parameters in real time.
4. Consumer-Facing Assistants Get an Upgrade
Indian mobility giant Ola re-launched its chatbot as Kruti, an indigenous agentic AI assistant—promising task completion, not just Q&A.
Expect more regional “super-apps” to embed autonomous flows (bill pay, travel rebooking, returns) rather than generic chat.
5. Investors Outline the Next Wave
VC notes highlight three macro bets:
- Vertical agents that own P&L in healthcare, finance, or logistics;
- Tooling layers (security, evaluation, orchestration) that make agents auditable;
- Hybrid reasoning (symbolic + neural) to keep costs in check.
6. What Builders Should Watch
6. What Builders Should Watch
- Observability & Safety: Silent failures ruin trust faster than bugs in CRUD apps. How do we log reasoning traces without overwhelming storage?
- Identity & Auth: Agents trigger real-world actions—who signs the checks? Cross-vendor “agent identity” standards remain nascent.
- Cost vs. Capability: Long-horizon planning can be GPU-hungry. Can retrieval-augmented or symbolic planners keep cloud bills sane?
- Human-in-Loop: Compliance teams still need veto power. What UX patterns make escalation seamless?
7. My Take
- Production beats prototypes. The May news cycle was less about flashy demos and more about service-level agreements.
- Vertical depth > horizontal breadth. Winning agents will likely own elite workflows (e.g., prior-auth in healthcare) before expanding outward.
- Software engineering principles still rule. Testing, rollout safety, and observability decide whether an agent moves from lab to prod.
Agentic AI is no longer a futuristic sidebar—it’s becoming the default lens for automation roadmaps. If you’re building in this space:
- Pick a pain point you can solve end-to-end.
- Instrument everything.
- Design for supervised autonomy: let agents act, but make review trivial.
💬 Connect with me on LinkedIn or subscribe to my Substack if you’d like to riff on agent architectures, evaluation tooling, or real-world deployment war stories.