Can Agents Use a Computer Yet? We've Got the Data | Andreessen Horowitz
Enterprise<br>Can Agents Use a Computer Yet? We’ve Got the Data
Fabrizio Serafini, Seema Amble, and Eric Zhou
Posted<br>August 10, 2026
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Can Agents Use a Computer Yet? We’ve Got the Data<br>Table of Contents
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It seems obvious to say, but if you leave Silicon Valley and go out into the rest of the world and tell them, “there are these things called agents, which are pretty smart, and can do tasks with you, and automate some of the repetitive parts of your work”, chances are the first question you’ll get back is, “Can they use a computer?”
This is a good question! Can they, really? The long horizon of productivity potential, out in the real economy we’re going to go unlock over decades, runs through pretty everyday work: can an agent sit (metaphorically) at a desk 24/7, and be trusted to use a web browser, fill out forms, click the right buttons, and not make mistakes? This is the domain of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), which historically meant, “can this work be outsourced?” but now has a new agentic frontier. We wrote about this last year, when the computer-use landscape was still mostly a bunch of demos. A lot has happened since then.
The models have improved faster than almost anyone expected. Computer-using agents are beginning to hold up in production at scale and on narrow, repeatable workflows: updating systems of record, moving data through portals, processing tickets, checking records, and handling the long tail of software where no clean API exists. With the right infrastructure, computer-use capabilities can now be deployed to tackle end-to-end tasks at scale, which before required either human supervision or direct human completion.
Today, workflows leveraging computer-use are far from perfect: agents are brittle when work drifts off the runbook, and for certain use-cases where caching is intractable (more below) they are expensive enough that the math does not work everywhere. But we’re seeing production deployments for standardized back-office work, especially where labor would otherwise be clicking through legacy systems by hand; the cost curve is starting to look compelling, considering that workflows leveraging computer-use offer structural advantages such...