Copilots, Agents, and Swarms: A Decision Framework for Data Teams

Every vendor in data engineering is an 'agent' now. Every product has 'agentic capabilities.' The word has lost all meaning - which makes it harder for data teams to evaluate what they actually need and what is just marketing. After talking to dozens of data teams, we think the confusion comes from collapsing three fundamentally different things into one buzzword. Getting the category wrong means either over-building (spending agent-level effort on a copilot problem) or under-building (slapping a chat interface on something that needs autonomous capability.