Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Steve Shapiro, Founder and AI Advisor at FinetuneAI and Prometric; Drew Bent, Education Lead at Anthropic; Nate Ober, Generative AI Strategist at Amazon; Raman Malik, VP of Product at Perplexity; and Narine Hall, Leading AI Product Strategy at Instructure.

The speakers explored how autonomous AI agents have come to dominate the narrative around the next phase of automation, while real-world deployments have revealed a far more mixed story. They discussed how teams running agentic systems in production have encountered fragile reasoning chains, shallow contextual grounding, and rapidly escalating compute costs as these systems scale.

The session distinguished hype from reality by examining where AI agents are delivering durable value, where they are breaking down, and which design choices are determining the difference. Through this conversation, the panel provided practical insight into the current state of agentic systems and what truly matters as organizations move from experimentation to implementation.