Do AI agents actually work? Or just glorified automations?

I keep seeing posts on LinkedIn like:

“We built AI agents and fired our marketing/sales/HR teams.”

In my opinion — total bullsh*t.

What I see (and do) is more like AI copilots, not autonomous agents.

Yes, AI helps — but it’s far from replacing skilled people.

Examples:

1. Generating landing pages for SEO? Sounds fully automatable — until you spend more time fixing bugs and formatting than if you just did it manually.

2. Automated outreach? The reply rates plummet unless you’re constantly tweaking copy, targeting, and prompts.

Most of what’s sold as “AI agents” is really just fancy n8n/Zapier chains running junior-level tasks with ChatGPT glued on.

Curious what others are seeing — is anyone actually running hands-off agents that truly replace work?