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SLMs are well-positioned for the agentic era because they use a narrow slice of LLM functionality for any single language model errand. LLMs are built to be powerful generalists, but most agents use only a very narrow subset of their capabilities.  They typically parse commands, generate structured outputs such as JSON for tool calls, or produce summaries and answer contextualized questions. These tasks are repetitive (up to the differences in prompt payloads), predictable, and highly specialized—well within the scope of specialized SLMs. An LLM trained to handle open-domain conversations is o