The AI ​​agent gold rush ends: the rise of pragmatism and the market’s moment of truth

Author: tong; Compiler: Vernacular Blockchain

The proxy gold rush is reaching its moment of truth. As capital tightens and attention wanes, the market is enforcing a simple rule: agents must be practical, not just possible.  Every agent now faces two basic tests:

"Will I use this?"

"Are regular people (not just tech enthusiasts) actually using this?" This trough cycle is natural selection, eliminating products that fail to solve real problems. The survivors will not be the most technically impressive, but those that are truly integrated into the lives of users.

 01 The inevitability of aggregation

The arrival of OpenAI's Agent API and Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) marks a powerful shift toward integration. The era of decentralized tools is coming to an end. Both technologies share the same core vision: to aggregate everything.

1. Unified Data Access: MCP eliminates the need to integrate with each data source separately. One protocol connects any AI to any information, whether it's your documents, databases, or real-time data streams.

2. Centralized Capabilities: Agent APIs integrate functions that previously required multiple components - reasoning, tool usage, network access, document search - into a single endpoint to automatically handle complex tasks. This is not just a technological evolution, but a collapse of artificial barriers. The complex agent ecosystem is being simplified into an aggregation layer, bringing everything together in one place, one interface.

 02 Market Paradox

“Agent Marketplace” has never made sense for practical agents. The failure of GPT Store was not accidental, but inevitable. No one wants to keep switching between different agents when they need a specific practical function. However, Character.AI has thrived with an almost identical marketplace model. The difference is in the purpose.  When personality becomes the product and not just the packaging, the market suddenly makes sense. People visit Character.AI not for utility but for connection, for the agency itself. Destination and tool in one.  This reveals a fundamental bifurcation in the agent economy:

Utility agents must integrate into “backstage” workflows

Personality agents must stand out as “frontstage” destinations

Personalization: a sustainable moat

As agent capabilities become infrastructure, what’s defensible? Not technology, but connection:

1. A visual identity that conveys a sense of belonging

2. Voice patterns that evoke familiarity

3. Knowledge that reflects your background

4. A personality that aligns with your preferences Every interaction deepens utility and connection—creating compound value that can’t be replicated through functionality.

 03 Embedded Future: The Rise of Agent Products

The collision of standardized infrastructure and personalization is not creating better agents, but agent products. This distinction is critical. Manus.im is a classic example of this evolution. It positions itself not as an "agent platform" but as a productivity companion that fits seamlessly into existing workflows. The model itself is unobtrusive - it quietly enhances human capabilities through tasks such as email drafting, meeting summarization, and information retrieval. The appeal of Manus is not novelty but invisibility - it eliminates the boundary between tool and assistant. It embodies the core principle that practical agents succeed by integrating into workflows. By focusing on user productivity rather than technical showboating, Manus captures the essence of the post-hype phase: real practicality that keeps users coming back every day. This is the embedded future: agents are no longer standalone entities, but agents are seamlessly integrated into the product DNA:

Invisible infrastructure: technology integrated into familiar workflows

Contextual intelligence: systems that understand your unique situation

Relationship-centric design: interfaces that learn and adapt to your preferencesStandalone agents will become relics of early experiments—just like standalone GPS devices before navigation became a feature of smartphones. The winners will build agents that completely dissolve the line between tool and assistant.

 04 Holoworld’s Strategic Vision

While others pursue text-based interfaces, Holoworld recognizes a fundamental truth: humans connect through visual storytelling. Two insights differentiate our approach:

Production over generation: Rather than chasing one-off novelties, we build full pipelines that produce beautiful assets for distribution

Relationship over utility: Our personalized visual/voice agents create a front-end that captures emotional connections while delegating utility to a modular back-endFor creators, this democratizes work that once required teams and budgets. For brands, this enables digital ambassadors who build authentic connections. At Holoworld, we’re pioneering a future where these trends converge. Our Agent Studio creates visual AI companions with unique personalities that generate broadcast-quality video from simple prompts while serving as the perfect interface for powerful AI capabilities like web search, data analysis, and task automation. Users don’t just get help—they build relationships with characters they truly love. This is exactly where the entire market is heading: intelligence is in the companions you connect with, not in tools you need to learn.

 05 Summary

The hype cycle has come to an end. Technology barriers are collapsing. The question is no longer “Can we build it?” but “Will anyone care?” The winners will not be those who launch the most agents, but those who create experiences so useful that they become invisible — complexity disappears, but possibility remains. The market has spoken. Practicality trumps possibility.