Utilizing Tech

This is a roundtable retrospective with three hosts sharing high-level impressions of their own season. Novel claims are almost absent; the conversation is dominated by vague observations about AI moving fast and agentic AI being hard to define, with one mildly interesting point about Claude Code developers not understanding their own model's trajectory buried in filler.

“agentic AI is still kind of a moving target in the sense when we ask people about a definition, the definitions can vary a little bit”

“not only does an agentic AI system learn from its users, it's actually also learning from its own output. And that kind of tells me that we as consumers of agentic AI might not always understand what's going on”

The episode recycles standard AI pundit discourse - rapid development, the cloud-computing-becoming-just-computing analogy, platform consolidation debates. A briefly raised idea about AI agents designing their own inter-agent communication protocols shows some spark but is dropped almost immediately without development.

“I used to say about cloud computing that we would stop calling cloud computing eventually. We just call it computing. I was kind of wrong”

“I would not be at all surprised if future AI agents interact with each other in a, an API and exchange data in a format that is, I don't want to say completely illegible, but at least not what we would have designed”

There are no external guests whatsoever - this is a pure three-host roundtable comprising an event organizer, a research analyst, and an HPC/AI consultant. None are practitioners who have built or deployed agentic AI systems at scale, and the conversation reflects that lack of hands-on depth.

“I'm Frederic Van Haren, the founder and CTO of Hifens and we provide HPC and AI consulting services”

“Guy Currier. I'm an analyst at the Futurum Group and um, I occasional participation and participant, uh, in Tech Field Day as well”

Company names are dropped (Salesforce, Microsoft, ServiceNow, OpenAI, Apple, Google) but purely as name-checks with no metrics, outcomes, timelines, or deal sizes. The one concrete personal example - using GPT-5 to process images and output JSON - is anecdotal and thin. A referenced Futurum Group report is mentioned but never cited with actual findings.

“the Futurum Group released a report on um, enterprise agentic AI platforms where they highlighted some big companies, you know, Salesforce, Microsoft ServiceNow, IBM, those kind of companies”

“I've been having IT process images and um, and give me JSON. And it is wild to watch that workflow because it is using, like I said, it's using Mathematica”

Questions are broad and open-ended ('is this really a thing?'), there is no pushback or productive disagreement between hosts who uniformly agree with one another, and the conversation visibly meanders - one host forgets his own argument mid-sentence. There is no external guest to challenge, and the hosting structure feels entirely unstructured.

“I just forgot actually to tell you the truth, there's a third one in there that I'll remember in a moment”

“So as we're nearing the end of our episode here, on the end of our season, um, I want to ask, um, maybe a difficult question to the two of you. And that difficult question is we've been talking about agentic AI... But is this really a thing?”