How agents will unlock the $500B promise of AI - Donald Hruska, Retool
Jul 23, 2025 · 16:22
Donald Hruska, engineering lead for Retool's Agents product, argues that AI agents will unlock the $500B promise of AI by moving enterprises beyond toy chatbots into production-grade systems. He explains that building a basic agent is easy (e.g., 100 lines of code using React) but getting it into production requires solving security, cost overruns, observability, and compliance. Hruska outlines four options—build from scratch, use a framework like LangGraph, a managed platform like Retool Agents, or verticalized agents—and advises building for core differentiators and buying for commodity workflows. He cites Retool customers like ClickUp saving over $200,000 in vendor costs and Descript saving hundreds of hours weekly, while noting inference costs dropped 99.7% from 2022-2024. Retool charges $3 per hour for its cheapest agent and supports on-prem deployment.
