Who’s counting the agent army?
The Waters Wrap: Agents are growing faster than the controls to manage them. Wei-Shen says that as firms struggle to measure their returns on investment, it may come down to who foots the bill.
Artificial intelligence, and in particular agentic AI, has been the topic du jour for most of the past year. It’s as if WatersTechnology’s editor-in-chief Anthony Malakian had a crystal ball with this headline: 2026 will be the year agent armies awaken.
It looks like it’s going to be a big army. Michael Yeo, head of capital markets at advisory IDC, predicted there will be more than 600 million active agents in financial services by 2030. That’s up from eight million agents in 2025, a 75-fold
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