Is the corporate world ready for agentic artificial intelligence (AI)? It depends on whom you ask, but it seems inevitable.
A stampede of agentic AI suitors such as Microsoft Corp., Anthropic, Cisco Systems Inc. and ServiceNow Inc. either jumped into the field or enhanced existing services of AI agents to assist customers in performing tasks more efficiently.
“It is a game changer for nearly every industry, and it is coming,” Meltwater Chief Technology Officer Aditya Jami said in an interview. Last week, the company announced its own AI agents.
“AI is very good at automating tasks, not jobs, and augmenting humans,” Anurag Dhingra, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Collaboration, said in an interview. “We will see more and more of this because there are not enough humans to man phones 24×7.”
Cisco demonstrated how AI assisted a credit card holder easily to resolve a $900 charge discrepancy over the phone. The agent, which was reached directly by phone without multiple prompts, sifted through the customer’s record and promptly gave them credit.
A vast swath of U.S. business leaders (80%) believe their organization’s implementation of AI is mature, according to a new report from remote connectivity software maker TeamViewer. Some 81% of key decision makers say they currently use AI at least weekly, up from 60% a year ago.
Nearly three-fourths (72%) of U.S. business leaders are convinced the technology is “vital” to improving their organization’s financial outcomes. Along these lines, two-thirds (66%) agree AI will positively affect revenue over the next year, with respondents saying the technology makes an average of 249% revenue growth possible.
What is more, 23% believe that not adopting AI puts them at risk of falling behind competitors, and 24% foresee increased costs without such automation.
The technology is likely to benefit enterprise operations in four waves: First through IT automating a multi-step process and customer service, followed by gains in finance and sales.
A byproduct of automation is time saved among employees from repetitive, low-level tasks, allowing them to collaborate freely with co-workers to become productive and creative, Carter Busse, chief information officer at Workato, said in an interview.
Busse said true AI agents are multi-step, multi-application agents that act rather than just think. In August, Workato launched Workato Agentic. The pre-built AI agents called Genies can react to relevant organizational information and data to orchestrate business processes that are traditionally handled manually.
Yet despite the hype over AI agents and their long-term promise, not everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. In fact, they’re reluctant to do so.
