--- title: "Market Pulse" canonical: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/2/market-pulse" publication: "TinyFish" publisher: "TinyFish" language: "en-US" guide: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt" permalink: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/2/market-pulse" issue: 2 section: "market-pulse" description: "Reading the agent ecosystem through a practitioner's lens" authors: ["Rina Takahashi"] published: 2025-11-05 updated: 2025-11-07 articles: 12 --- # TinyFish > CURRENT is a journal about AI agents in production, for the engineering and product leaders who have to make them work. Drawing on experience building enterprise web agents, it explains why the demo succeeded and the deployment didn't, and what that means for choosing vendors, briefing the board, and avoiding mistakes others have already made. [Read on the website]() ## Issue 2 — Market Pulse Reading the agent ecosystem through a practitioner's lens ### The Week's Architecture Signal - [The Infrastructure Gap Between Promising Outcomes and Charging for Them]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2025-11-04 · Format: The Signal Been watching the clouds gather around seat-based pricing for months—every customer conversation circles back to "why am I paying for licenses when agents could do this?" Automation Anywhere buying Aisera this week feels like the first real attempt to actually build infrastructure for charging by outcomes, not just talking about it. Their 40% fewer ITSM seats claim isn't what got me—it's that they're betting they can prove what agents accomplished and charge for that at enterprise scale. - [The Work That Never Was]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2025-11-07 A company sits on 50,000 customer contracts. Somewhere in those documents: signals about which customers might buy the next product. Valuable intelligence that could drive millions in revenue. But no one ever reads them. Not because it's too expensive to hire people. Because the work simply never happened. Box CEO Aaron Levie keeps hearing this pattern from enterprise customers deploying AI agents. Everyone thinks they know why. They're wrong about the barrier. - [The Work That Never Was]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2025-11-07 A company has 50,000 customer contracts. Mining them for upsell signals would be valuable. They've never tried. Not because they didn't want to—because attempting it would bleed money at any price. Box CEO Aaron Levie keeps hearing variations of this story. Enterprise customers deploying AI agents aren't replacing existing work. They're enabling tasks companies never attempted in the first place. The barrier wasn't cost. So what was it? ### Reading the Forward Signal - [Which Web Automation Components Are Actually Swappable]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2025-11-04 · Format: Field Notes Been watching the composability wave build—swap models, connect tools, build from whatever works best. Forty-five enterprise providers just committed to interoperability. The story says everything becomes modular. But when you're actually running web agents at scale, something weird happens: the components that look easiest to replace turn out to be the hardest. And the pieces that seem locked-in? Those compose fine. ### Surface Story, Deeper Pattern - [ServiceNow's Agent Play Isn't About Better Technology]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2025-11-04 · Format: Dual Lens Watched a team deploy ServiceNow agents last week and the thing that got me wasn't the tech quality... it's how each workflow they automate makes leaving harder. Every incident management process that gets agent-ified is another reason they can't switch platforms. That's the real story—ServiceNow doesn't need better AI than LangChain, they just own the layer where work happens. So adding agents extends the moat, right? We see the opposite at TinyFish—workflows that cross system boundaries, no platform owns them—and it's a completely different infrastructure problem. - [Why Vertical Platforms Let Horizontal Tools Do the Hard Work]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2025-11-04 · Format: Dual Lens But here's what ServiceNow's actually doing while everyone watches those deployment numbers... they're letting horizontal frameworks do all the hard work. LangChain, AutoGen, all of them—basically free R&D. They take the risk figuring out orchestration patterns, what works at scale, what doesn't. ServiceNow just observes, waits to see what proves out, then integrates the good stuff. No experimentation cost. We're doing this too, stress-testing infrastructure approaches that might not work... and vertical platforms learn from everyone's failures without funding any of it. Kind of brilliant, honestly. ### Production Gap Reality Check - [OpenAI's Agent Hits Production Reality]() — Published 2025-11-04 OpenAI launched ChatGPT agent in January 2025 promising autonomous browser-based task execution. The demo showed smooth navigation, intelligent decision-making, workflows that run themselves. ### Quiet Tech That Compounds While everyone watches model benchmarks and demo videos, a different set of developments is quietly solving the problems that actually keep agents out of production. How do agents from different providers communicate without custom integrations? How do you make API costs predictable when context windows keep growing? How do you guarantee valid JSON without post-processing failures? These questions don't generate headlines. They generate working systems. This week's developments share a pattern: standards reaching maturity, cost optimization enabled by default, deterministic outputs replacing probabilistic hope, observability that integrates with existing enterprise stacks. Infrastructure that fades into the background. Which is exactly what production systems need. - **Agent Communication Gets Its HTTP Moment** — [Source]() — Published 2025-11-04 Tag: Protocol Maturity Google's A2A protocol under Linux Foundation stewardship establishes JSON-RPC over HTTPS standards for agent-to-agent communication. Discovery, authentication, secure task delegation between providers. Multi-agent systems need this kind of foundational agreement before they can scale beyond single-vendor demos. - **Context Caching Becomes Default, Not Optional** — [Source]() — Published 2025-11-04 Tag: Caching Economics Gemini 2.5 enables caching automatically. DeepSeek's disk-based approach cuts cache hits to $0.014 per million tokens, delivering 90% cost reductions for repeated contexts. First-token latency drops from 13 seconds to 500ms. Production economics just shifted from unpredictable to manageable. - **Pre³ Guarantees Valid JSON Without Parsing** — [Source]() — Published 2025-11-04 Tag: Structured Outputs Deterministic pushdown automata eliminate runtime parsing overhead. Pre³ integrates into inference frameworks, reducing time-per-output-token by 40% and boosting throughput 36%. When you're processing millions of requests, guaranteed valid JSON matters more than impressive demos with occasional failures. - **IBM Makes Agent Behavior Actually Observable** — [Source]() — Published 2025-11-04 Tag: Agent Governance AgentOps adds lifecycle monitoring and policy-based control to production agents. Built on OpenTelemetry standards, it integrates with existing observability stacks like Datadog and Splunk. You can't run agents at scale without visibility into what they're actually doing. Now you have it. - **HashiCorp Builds Knowledge Layer for Autonomous Systems** — [Source]() — Published 2025-11-04 Tag: Infrastructure Graphs Project infragraph creates real-time knowledge graphs connecting infrastructure, applications, services, and ownership across cloud providers and Kubernetes clusters. Currently in beta. This creates the foundational layer for AI agents to reason about infrastructure state and propose changes autonomously. ## Other sections in Issue 2 - [Daily Brief]() - [Foundations]() - [Practitioner's Corner]() - [Echoes]() - [Vision]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()