December 27, 2025, 7:02 AM EST. 2025 was billed as the year AI agents would join the workforce and perform multi-step tasks. Yet, promises from OpenAI leadership and Davos rhetoric collided with real-world limits. The piece explains why chatbots remain useful for prompts and drafts but struggle to autonomously navigate software, browsers, and forms. Even as executives spoke of a digital labor revolution, automation fell short of disruptive change. The result: overpromising, underdelivering, and a wake-up call about the gap between flashy demos and durable, scalable AI in everyday tasks like booking travel or submitting online forms.
