NETWORK PERSPECTIVE
Phil Scott’s
Network Perspective
Phil Scott, Chief Sales Officer at Technetix, shares his take on the fast-changing world of telecoms and how it intersects with technology. With a wealth of industry experience, he brings fresh, insightful and funny perspectives on the people, ideas and innovations that shape our industry.
the banks of the River Thames triggered three separate outbreaks of cholera. Then, as now, a problem that mounted with time and lack of attention had far reaching consequences. According to AI itself, “Agentic AI represents a shift from passive, prompt- driven AI to autonomous systems that reason, plan, act and iterate to achieve goals with minimal human intervention.” As long as nobody mentions Skynet, it seems this shift will happen in the same understated way that LLMs were first introduced in our lives. But is it really a shift? According to Gartner, 70% of agentic AI projects will fail by 2026. And if we believe Reece Hayden of ABI research then they aren’t really “agentic” projects at all, “just dressed-up generative workflows”. At a recent 18th birthday party for one of my family members, the main discussion topic was not “which shot are we doing next?” or “who should really win this series of love island?”, but
Agentic AI and the Invisible Plumbing Problem Eighteen months ago, one of my sales team who was well versed in AI predicted that the next wave of high-salary employees would be prompt engineers – capable of eliciting from ChatGPT and other LLMs what mere mortals could not. Just a year and a half later, having dinner at a lovely canal-side restaurant in Amsterdam, it was declared that “agentic AI has already killed the prompt engineer”. Such is the speed at which AI is moving that we can barely keep up. However, one thing remains a potential thorn in the side for the collective noun, ‘AI’, that describes anything remotely futuristic. That thorn can be associated with a term dating back to Victorian times as “The Great Stink”. Sewer systems were all the rage in 1858, but poor forward planning, exacerbated by the hot weather of that year, meant the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent present on
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DECEMBER 2025 Volume 47 No.4
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