The demos look slick, the promises even slicker. In slides and keynotes, agentic assistants plan, click, and ship your work while you sip coffee. Promoters like McKinsey call it the agentic AI advantage.

Then you put these systems on real client work and the wheels come off. The newest empirical benchmark from researchers at the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI finds current AI agents completing only a tiny fraction of jobs at a professional standard.

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