When a vendor brags about 13 agents, run

The agent count is marketing, not capability. What the agents are wired into tells you everything.

The AXO Team

Notes on agentic personalization

The new pitch in martech is the agent count. A vendor gets you on a call and announces they now have thirteen agents available. A research agent, a copy agent, a segmentation agent, an optimization agent, and nine more you'll never use. The number is supposed to impress you. It should do the opposite.

Thirteen agents is a red flag. It usually means thirteen thin wrappers around a model someone else built, bolted onto a product that needed a story for the AI era. The count is marketing, not capability: a way to look like you're at the frontier without doing the hard part.

We're not trying to build the best AI

Here's our honest position: we don't think anyone can out-build Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google on the actual models. That's a capital-and-research race measured in billions, and it's already being run by people who are very good at it. Pretending a martech company is going to win it is how you get thirteen agents that are really one mediocre prompt thirteen times.

The opportunity isn't building the model. It's the tooling around the model: exposing your product through MCP, a CLI, the interfaces that let a capable AI actually drive your system and let your customers compose it into their own workflows. Some companies are quietly doing this real work. Others are doing what we'd call agent washing: slapping "agentic" on the same old features and counting them up.

How to tell the difference

Ask what the agents actually do that the product couldn't do before. Ask whether you can drive the thing from your own tooling, or whether you're locked into their chat box. Ask who built the underlying model. And if the answer is "we did," ask how, because that's an extraordinary claim.

A real AI strategy makes your product controllable and composable. Agent washing just makes the deck longer. The number of agents tells you nothing. What they're wired into tells you everything.