Author: tong
Translated by: Bai Hua Blockchain
The agent gold rush is now facing its moment of truth. With capital tightening and attention waning, the market is enforcing a simple rule: agents must be useful, not just potentially so. Each agent now faces two fundamental tests:
"Will I actually use this?"
"Are regular people (not just tech enthusiasts) actually using this?" This trough period is natural selection, weeding out products that cannot solve real problems. The survivors will not be the most technologically impressive, but those that truly integrate into users' lives.
The Inevitability of Aggregation
The arrival of OpenAI's agent API and Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) marks a powerful shift towards integration. The era of decentralized tools is ending. These two technologies share the same core vision: to aggregate everything.
1. Unified data access: MCP eliminates the need to integrate with each data source separately. A single protocol can connect any AI to any information, whether it's your documents, databases, or real-time data streams.
2. Centralized capabilities: Agent APIs integrate functions previously requiring multiple components - reasoning, tool use, web access, document search - into a single endpoint that automatically handles complex tasks. This is not just technological evolution, but the collapse of human barriers. The complex agent ecosystem is simplifying into an aggregation layer, consolidating everything into one place, one interface.
The Market Paradox
The "agent market" has never made sense for practical agents. The failure of the GPT app store was not a coincidence, but a necessity. No one wants to constantly switch between different agents to access specific useful features. However, Character.AI has thrived with an almost identical market model. The difference lies in the purpose. When personality becomes the product, not just the packaging, the market suddenly makes sense. People visit Character.AI not for utility, but for connection, for the agent itself. The destination and the tool become one. This reveals the fundamental bifurcation of the agent economy:
Practical agents must integrate into "backend" workflows
Personalized agents must stand out as "front-end" destinations
Personalization: A Sustainable Moat
As agent capabilities become infrastructure, what is defensible? Not the technology, but the connection:
Visual identity that conveys a sense of belonging
Vocal patterns that evoke familiarity
Knowledge that reflects your background
Personality aligned with your preferences Each interaction deepens the utility and connection, creating compound value that cannot be replicated through functionality alone.
The 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 crucial. Manus.im is a typical example of this evolution. It does not position itself as an "agent platform", but as a productivity companion seamlessly integrated into existing workflows. The model itself is not remarkable - it quietly enhances human capabilities through tasks like email drafting, meeting summaries, and information retrieval. Manus' appeal is not in novelty, but in invisibility - it blurs the line between tool and assistant. It embodies the core principle of practical agents succeeding by integrating into workflows. By focusing on user productivity rather than technological showmanship, Manus has captured the essence of the post-hype stage: the true, daily usefulness that brings users back. This is the embedded future: agents are no longer standalone entities, but have their capabilities seamlessly woven into the product DNA:
Invisible infrastructure: Technology integrated into familiar workflows
Contextual intelligence: Systems that understand your unique circumstances
Relationship-centric design: Interfaces that learn and adapt to your preferences Independent agents will become relics of early experimentation, just as navigation became a feature of smart phones rather than a standalone GPS device. The winners will build agent products, where the boundary between tool and assistant completely dissolves.
Holoworld's Strategic Vision
While others pursue text interfaces, Holoworld recognizes a fundamental truth: humans connect through visual narratives. Two insights distinguish our approach:
Production, not generation: We don't chase one-off novelty, but build complete pipelines to produce distributable, high-quality assets
Relationships over utility: Our personalized visual/voice agents create an emotive front-end that captures connections, while delegating utility to a modular backend For creators, this democratizes work that once required teams and budgets. For brands, it enables digital ambassadors that forge genuine connections. At Holoworld, we are pioneering the future where these trends converge. Our Agent Studio creates unique personality-driven visual AI companions that can generate broadcast-quality videos 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 form relationships with characters they genuinely like. This is the direction the entire market is heading: intelligence embodied in the companions you connect with, not the tools you have to learn.
In Summary
The hype cycle has run its course. Technological barriers are crumbling. The question is no longer "Can we build it?" but "Will anyone care?" The winners won't be those who launch the most agents, but those who create experiences so useful that they become invisible - complexity disappears, possibility remains. The market has spoken. Utility trumps possibility.
