Very much captures my recent experience with investment research workflows.
Not yet production grade in the finance vertical, but Grok Bot with a vertical AI Excel API, connected with my Skills Pack is *finally* showing me what's possible with agents for investment research. It is quickly shifting from a concept spec on a power-point slide to something that's actually doing real research. I believe many priors of "LLMs don't work for hedge fund style research" will fall over the next 6-12 months (already happening with Excel workflows).
@levie:
"Now with computer use, long running agents, harness improvements and surrounding infrastructure, we’re finally at a point where we can start to apply agents at more complex workflows"
This is correct. The vast majority of enterprise workflows have not actually had agents applied to them in any meaningful way. The economy probably has this deployed < 1% right now.
At best you have a few automated systems in a company that do a single pass of an LLM to make a decision or provide feedback, but very little real “automation”. Some of this is a statement about the adoption rates of technology in enterprises, but the vast majority of it is really just due to the capability of AI itself.
That’s all changing. Now with computer use, long running agents, harness improvements and surrounding infrastructure, we’re finally at a point where we can start to apply agents at more complex workflows.
We will see self-improving systems that can take any particular workflow goal and improve the execution rates over a volume of instances. And with the emerging form factor of agent swarms, you can just choose to deploy any amount of compute at a problem and agents will off and do the work.
This won’t be about and users prompting agents to complete a specific task for them, but instead the organization reengineering the underlying workflows to take advantage of agents in their processes. This will have a massive impact in finance, life sciences, healthcare, and other information-heavy domains. Lots of opportunity to build and deploy these systems right now.