---
title: "Agentic AI, beyond the hype | SoftHouse Advisory"
description: "Everyone is talking about AI agents. We're building them. Here's what we've learned about what works, what doesn't, and what's actually ready for production."
url: "https://softhouseadvisorywebsite-43udbdhbv-softhouse-advisory.vercel.app/insights/agentic-ai-beyond-the-hype"
---

# Agentic AI, beyond the hype

Everyone is talking about AI agents. We're building them. Here's what we've learned about what works, what doesn't, and what's actually ready for production.

*Draft placeholder. Full article pending author sign-off.*

Agents are having a moment. The vendor pitches make it sound as if it's solved. We've shipped enough of them to know it isn't, and to have a view on which kinds are ready for production work and which aren't.

## What actually works today

Document-heavy workflows: intake, extraction, classification, routing. Anything where a human currently reads a stack of PDFs and makes a repeatable call. These agents ship reliably now. The Claude Agent SDK plus a decent tool set gets you most of the way.

## What nearly works

Multi-step processes that span several systems. The LLM reasoning is usually fine; the hard part is giving the agent stable tool access. MCP has changed this significantly over the past year. We expect this category to ship cleanly in 2026.

## What doesn't work yet

Open-ended planning tasks with long horizons and expensive failure modes. Any role where you'd hesitate to give a junior hire full autonomy, you should hesitate to give an agent too.