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#40: AI Agents Are Winning the Market - But Losing to These 10 Careers

AgentPulse: Your Weekly Dose of AI Agents News.

Author

O P
August 04, 2025

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Welcome back, AI Agent Enthusiast!

In today’s Agent Pulse:

  • 📢 Top Headlines

  • ⚔️ Agent Arena

  • ✨ Featured Agents

  • 📡 Agent Signals

  • 🎓 Free courses

  • 📚 Must-Read Papers

  • 🗺️ Landscape Map

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📢 TOP Headlines

Microsoft Reveals the 10 Most AI-Resistant Jobs

A new Microsoft Research study analyzing 200,000+ Copilot interactions reveals which jobs are least impacted by today’s AI tools. The results? It’s not knowledge workers topping the “AI-safe” list - it’s roles rooted in the physical world.

Top 10 AI-Resistant Careers:

  1. Phlebotomists

  2. Nursing Assistants

  3. Hazardous Materials Workers

  4. Painters & Plasterers

  5. Embalmers

  6. Plant/System Operators

  7. Oral & Maxillofacial Surgeons

  8. Auto Glass Installers

  9. Ship Engineers

  10. Tire Repairers

These jobs rely on physical precision, on-site presence, and human empathy - areas where LLMs and agents still fall short.

Why It Matters:

  • Agent builders: Not everything needs automating. Focus on augmenting human workflows, not replacing them.

  • Tool design: Hybrid models (AI + human) remain essential in sectors like healthcare, logistics, and maintenance.

  • Strategic insight: Real-world, manual, and emotional labor still holds long-term defensibility against AI.

This study is a reality check: the agent future is coming, but it’s not taking over every job. Not yet.

Who Owns the AI Agent Market 2025?

A fresh ResearchAndMarkets report pegs OpenAI, Google, and AWS as the top-tier leaders in the AI agent market. Meanwhile, industry giants like IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce are expanding their agent capabilities through acquisitions, strategic partnerships, and internal R&D.

What the Report Actually Says

  • OpenAI, Google, AWS hold between 42–50% of the agent market, driven by their model pipelines, developer platforms (like GPTs, Vertex Agents, Bedrock AgentCore), and enterprise ecosystems.

  • IBM stays relevant through regulated-industry positioning. Its WatsonX Assistant excels in audit-heavy sectors by offering compliance tools and role-based access controls.

  • Microsoft expands Copilot Studio across business workflows. Salesforce boosts agents via Slack integrations and Einstein enhancements.

The market is projected to grow from $6B in 2024 to over $50B by 2030, at an average CAGR near 46%.

Market Signals Indicating Real Momentum

  • North America dominates premium deployments. Agent apps in the U.S. generate significantly higher revenue than deployed agents in other regions, often in the $100K–$1M/year range per deployment.

  • Asia-Pacific is the volume engine. China and India are driving rapid adoption across industries via government-led AI skilling programs and tailorable local agents.

Takeaways

The agent market is gravitating toward two parallel tiers:

  • Platform leaders: OpenAI, Google, AWS - focused on distribution, scalability, and enterprise integration

  • Specialist challengers: IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce - packaging agents into industry workflows like CRM, HR, and finance

Why This Matters

If you’re building an agent-ready platform, API, or modifiable agent, this consolidation wave matters:

  1. Distribution leverage matters more than model novelty. Without ecosystem embedding, most agents struggle for adoption.

  2. Positioning within ecosystems is critical. Generic agents will be overshadowed unless they serve workflows in CRMs, finance, HR, or vertical SaaS.

  3. Interoperability is the moat. As platforms standardize with gRPC / A2A protocols, owning cross-agent integration becomes defensible.

Agents may be emerging tech, but dominance will go to those who build the glue and scaffolding around agent execution layers, not just the model itself.

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  1. ChatGPT-4o

  2. Gemma 3 4b

  3. Grok 3 Fast

  4. Llama 3.3 70B Instruct

  5. Kimi K@ Instruct

✨ Featured Agents

📡 TOP Agent Signals

  • WorkFusion launched an AI agent named “Edward” to automate enhanced due diligence (EDD) tasks for financial institutions

  • Chinese startup Manus unveiled Wide Research, a multi-agent AI feature for large-scale parallel research tasks, in a late-July announcement

  • Fetch.ai and DFINITY’s Internet Computer kicked off the NextGen Agents Hackathon for developers to build on-chain AI agents on decentralized cloud infrastructure.

  • A ResearchAndMarkets report identified OpenAI, Google, and AWS as leaders in the AI agent market and noted major players like IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce expanding their agent-based offerings through partnerships and R&D.

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📚 Must Read Papers

  1. AWS: Agentic AI frameworks (Doc)

  2. KPMG: AI Quarterly Pulse Survey: Q2 2025 (Doc)

  3. Stanford University: Future of Work with AI Agents (Doc)

  4. Google: Guide for using AI at work (Doc)

  5. Google: An Introduction to AI Agent Security (Doc)

  6. Thomson Reuters: Agentic AI 101 (Doc)

  7. OpenAI: A Practical Guide to building Agents (Doc)

  8. BCG: AI at Work (Doc)

  9. ServiceNow: Enterprise AI Maturity Index 2025 (Doc)

  10. IBM: Agentic AI in Financial Services (Doc)

  11. Capgemini: Rise of Agentic AI (Doc)

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