Show Notes
Will Black Friday 2025 be the breakout moment for agentic commerce? This week on Mixture of Experts, we're departing from our usual format for a Thanksgiving special focused entirely on AI agents. Host Tim Hwang is joined by Chris Hay, Lauren McHugh Olende and Volkmar Uhlig to debate whether 2025 is truly the "year of agents." Our experts break down why consumer-facing agentic commerce still faces major hurdles. We also explore the massive gap between building agent prototypes and deploying them at scale and discuss why the developer ecosystem needs a "Shopify moment." Then, could language-to-agent interfaces bypass traditional development entirely? From coding agents like Claude Code to cost optimization challenges, this episode covers what needs to happen for agents to move from POC to production. And finally, who's positioned to dominate the space?
Plus: Anthropic dropped Claude 4.5 Opus this week. We sit down with Mihai Criveti to discuss initial impressions of the new model. Does this put Anthropic back at the top of the AI game?
00:00 – Introduction 01:12 – Claude 4.5 Opus is here 09:32 – Will Black Friday be big for agentic commerce? 16:11– Agent experience for consumers vs. Enterprise 17:31 – Is 2025 the year of the Agent? 23:02 — AI agents in the developer ecosystem 31:16 — Who will win the agent race?
The opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of IBM or any other organization or entity.
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More from Mixture of Experts
Visit Mixture of Experts podcast page to get more AI content → https://www.ibm.com/think/podcasts/mixture-of-experts This week on Mixture of Experts, host David Zax is joined by Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Nick Gallagher, and Volkmar Uhlig. First, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cloudflare follow TypeSafe’s Jev in building decision models, a new category of AI built to make fast, scored judgments. The panel debates whether these models are truly new or a more efficient application of existing technology, and whether better-calibrated confidence scores can help address the overconfidence problem in LLMs. Next, a new study finds that teams of AI agents can cost two to five times more than a single agent without consistently delivering better results. The panel discusses when multiple agents are worth the added cost and complexity. Finally, Anthropic updates its usage policy to prohibit “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward its models, raising a bigger question: Is this about protecting AI, shaping human behavior, or something else entirely? The panel considers the ethical implications and whether the policy could also be a marketing play.
Visit Mixture of Experts podcast page to get more AI content → https://www.ibm.com/think/podcasts/mixture-of-experts
Visit Mixture of Experts podcast page to get more AI content → https://www.ibm.com/think/podcasts/mixture-of-experts
Visit Mixture of Experts podcast page to get more AI content → https://www.ibm.com/think/podcasts/mixture-of-experts
Visit Mixture of Experts podcast page to get more AI content → https://www.ibm.com/think/podcasts/mixture-of-experts On episode 125 of Mixture of Experts, host Tim Hwang and co-host David Zax are joined by Mihai Criveti and Abraham Daniels to discuss the back and forth of frontier AI development, IBM’s latest Granite news, and what’s next for personal agents.