I can't see some tasks, particularly booking concert tickets, being done by AI agents

I'm not sure I follow... Care to elaborate?

I can absolutely see the potential for abuse and a race to produce faster agents. Now that I think about it, before too long "Time To First Token" will become an uninteresting metric, and agents will all be steerable/interruptible mid-task, enabling legit real-time language processing (as opposed to the batch-mode they currently have).