Does the future belong to a handful of all-powerful, wide-ranging artificial intelligence agents that navigate the world on our behalf — successors to the ChatGPTs, Claudes and Groks that seek to handle almost any task you throw at them? Or will it be populated by a host of specialised digital aides, each trained to take on a narrow task and invoked only when needed?

Some mix of the two seems likely, but the sheer pace of change has left even leaders in the field admitting they have little idea of how things will look a year or two out.

For proponents of the “One AI to rule them all” idea, there have been plenty of encouraging developments. OpenAI, for instance, added a shopping feature to ChatGPT this week that points to how personalised AI agents could reorder the economics of ecommerce. Using a single query to get a chatbot to do your product research and make a buying recommendation threatens to subvert the entire “funnel” that brands have relied on to steer buyers, putting OpenAI very much at the centre.