AI Agents Tried Running a Company—and Failed 75% of the Time

TECH

By Aniket Chakraborty May 26, 2025 Arrow

Their fictional firm, TheAgentCompany, had no humans—just bots from top AI labs.

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Agents were assigned roles: software engineers, analysts, managers, even HR.

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But most agents flopped—Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet only completed 24% of tasks.

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Other models, like Google’s Gemini 2 Flash, performed even worse—barely 11% success.

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Simple jobs like naming a Word file or closing a popup left bots confused.

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Some bots created fake coworkers instead of finding real ones in internal chats.

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CMU researchers found that agents broke down as task complexity increased.

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Yet companies like Johnson & Johnson and Moody’s are already experimenting with AI agents.

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The verdict? AI can help humans—but it can’t replace them. Not yet.

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