The agent stack is so boring where buyers keep looking: the loop.
Loop in sight, the rest of the system is elsewhere in the loop (the agent loop did not disappear). Even more, a layer has been created to manage durable records of work done by the agent: state (a durable record of the work done by the AI agent to service customer requests). This is the crux of enterprise work. The enterprise will configure a system (AI or not) to create and maintain such records and also decide who can read such records, how long to keep them, what they are allowed to do with such records, etc. With the introduction of the state layer, AI agent infrastructure now splits at the state layer. Model + a prompt-centered agent no longer represents the infrastructure argument for AI agents.
The state layer of an AI agent is now the dividing line between the agent being a product and the agent being a parlor trick that happens to access Salesforce etc.
The loop is the wrong buying surface
The harder questions live one layer down.
