Welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…President Trump takes aim at state AI regulations with a new executive order…OpenAI unveils a new image generator to catch up with Google’s Nano Banana….Google DeepMind trains a more capable agent for virtual worlds…and an AI safety report card doesn’t provide much reassurance.
Hello. 2025 was supposed to be the year of AI agents. But as the year draws to a close, it is clear such prognostications from tech vendors were overly optimistic. Yes, some companies have started to use AI agents. But most are not yet doing so, especially not in company-wide deployments.
A McKinsey “State of AI” survey from last month found that a majority of businesses had yet to begin using AI agents, while 40% said they were experimenting. Less than a quarter said they had deployed AI agents at scale in at least one use case; and when the consulting firm asked people about whether they were using AI in specific functions, such as marketing and sales or human resources, the results were even worse. No more than 10% of survey respondents said they had AI agents “fully scaled” or were “in the process of scaling” in any of these areas. The one function with the most usage of scaled agents was IT (where agents are often used to automatically resolve service tickets or install software for employees), and even here only 2% reported having agents “fully scaled,” with an additional 8% saying they were “scaling.”
