Yesterday was UnaGo's first birthday. By coincidence, it also fell on the day of an epic eclipse, which felt like a fitting way to mark the occasion.
A year is not a long time, but in AI it feels like an era.
When we started UnaGo, "agentic AI" was still a phrase that relatively few people outside the industry knew. Today, companies around the world are waking up to the potential of AI agents, not simply to answer questions or generate content, but to actually get work done.
We are speaking with customers and potential customers across different industries and countries who are asking remarkably similar questions: what routine work can we automate, where can agents save us time and how can we give our people more time to focus on work that actually needs them?
The technology is moving incredibly quickly
The progress in AI models over the past year has been extraordinary.
Models that were considered frontier a year ago have already been overtaken. The choice has exploded too. Powerful Chinese and open-source models have entered the market at a fraction of the cost of the leading frontier models.
For businesses, this creates both an opportunity and a challenge. The best model today may not be the best model six months from now. Building around a single provider increasingly looks like the wrong approach.
One of our biggest learnings has been that the value is not simply in having access to the smartest model. It is in being able to use the right model for the right task and turn that intelligence into reliable work.
AI adoption is harder than it looks
We have also seen a gap between companies wanting to adopt AI and successfully embedding it into the way they work.
Many businesses have experimented with AI platforms, pilots and enterprise tools. But too often the result is more work rather than less: another interface to learn, another system to manage or another tool that employees quietly stop using.
At the same time, those same employees are often using their own AI assistants every day because they are useful, flexible and increasingly understand how they like to work.
There is an important lesson in that.
People do not want AI for the sake of having AI. They want tools that understand what they are trying to achieve, fit naturally into their existing work and make their lives easier.
The opportunity is bigger than we thought
We started UnaGo with a belief that teams of specialist AI agents could take on meaningful pieces of work.
A year later, we believe that more strongly than ever.
We are seeing businesses look beyond isolated AI tasks towards automating complete processes: researching and qualifying sales leads, enriching CRM data, creating and localising advertising, analysing campaign performance and handling the repetitive work that consumes hours of people's time.
The goal is not to remove people from businesses. It is to remove work that people should not have to spend their time doing.
There is still a huge amount to learn. The technology will keep changing, probably faster than any of us expect. Some of today's leading models, products and approaches will inevitably be replaced.
But the direction is becoming much clearer.
AI agents are moving from an interesting technology to a practical business tool. The companies that succeed with them will be the ones that focus less on AI itself and more on where it can genuinely make work better.
Thank you to the UnaGo team, our customers and everyone who has supported, challenged and helped us during our first year.
We have come a long way in 12 months.
Year two should be interesting.