4 ways to get your business ready for the agentic AI revolution

Experts suggest agentic AI will redefine business workflows during the rest of this decade. Consultant Accenture suggests agents — not people — will be the primary users of enterprise digital systems by 2030.

As many as 93% of IT leaders intend to introduce AI agents within the next two years. However, despite all the hype around agentic AI, business leaders told ZDNET the path to an agentic transformation is far from straightforward, and many challenges must be overcome.

Also: 25% of enterprises using AI will deploy AI agents by 2025

Here are four ways your business can get ready for AI agents.

1. Find great use cases

James Fleming, CIO at the Francis Crick Institute, said his organization is testing agents and experimenting with Meta’s Llama 3 model.

“We’re looking at various data sets to see if there’s any utility we can derive from the technology,” he said, suggesting agents can help with literature synthesis.

“The amount of research published globally is astonishing. Staying ahead of your field is a full-time job. Synthesizing the last 25 papers in a discipline into something readable and informative means agents could often be quite good at that activity.”

Also: AI agents will significantly improve employee productivity

Fleming told ZDNET that initial explorations into agents have shown that automation can be challenging, especially in a world-leading research organization.

“That issue goes back to scientific rigor. You’ve got to be damn sure it’s doing something useful,” he said.

“Otherwise, it’s just another mechanism for generating false leads. So, to get over that hill of ‘this is a genuinely useful tool’ is a high one.”

Fleming said the use case is everything. There is a big difference between using agents for diary planning and life-saving research. Humans must be kept in the loop.

“That’s not to say there’s no gain with the technology,” he said. “It’s just targeting agents specifically within the research life cycle — and not at the stage where it can supplant human thought and creativity.”

2. Create room for explorations

Carrie Jordan, Microsoft’s global director of program execution, said agents and bots are exciting innovations.

“The ability to connect them in the background, to talk to each other, and to achieve multiple tasks versus just a single thread, is potentially powerful,” she said.

Jordan explained to ZDNET how the sales proposals team at Microsoft explores Copilot Studio technology as part of a Center of Excellence (CoE).

“They’re getting curious,” she said. “Agents are still relatively new, so we’re figuring out the best way to leverage that technology. But there’s a lot of potential there. I think it will be a game-changer.”

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However, while Microsoft is pursuing a range of AI-led projects internally and for its customers, Jordan said it’s important for business leaders like herself to avoid being swept up in the hype.

She suggested the CoE’s explorations will help the proposals team sort the agentic wheat from the chaff.

“I can see the potential of AI in general, and agents in particular because they can help solve a gap with single-threaded AI, which is only being able to do one thing at a time,” she said.

“When you can set up complex systems of agents, that approach has lots of potential.”

3. Build a partnership approach

Raymond Boyle, vice president of data and analytics at Hyatt Hotels, said his organization takes a tried-and-trusted approach to emerging technologies like agents: let line-of-business departments decide how innovations are exploited.

“We look at those transformations with our business partners and through a lens that looks at their work,” he said.

“We won’t introduce change to the business. We’ll introduce change with the business and work through the challenges and things they believe are most important in finance, digital, loyalty, and sales.”

Also: AI agents may soon surpass people as primary application users

Boyle told ZDNET that Hyatt gets its business leaders to think through how tech-enabled change might work in their parts of the organization.

Agents could be used eventually, but only once a partnership approach identifies the right opportunities.

“Agents are becoming a big part of how generative AI and machine learning are used in business today. The way agents will be used in travel will be fascinating to watch. I think this technology will certainly be a part of the mix,” he said.

“The process for Hyatt will be to find the right technologies — and we’ll do that in close partnership with our business leaders and the technology teams that run the applications. We’ll then provide the AI services to drive those transitions for the business.”

4. Be prepared to fail

Keith Woolley, chief digital and information officer at the University of Bristol, is another digital leader who sees the potential benefits of agents. However, he said these advantages will become manifest over the longer term.

“We are looking at agentic AI, but we’re not implementing it yet,” he said. “We sit as a management team and ask questions like, ‘Should we do our admissions process using agentic AI? What would be the advantage?'”

Woolley told ZDNET he could envision a situation in which AI and automation help assess and inform candidates worldwide about the status of their applications.

“The benefits to us, in terms of cost and operational efficiencies, could be substantial. Also, the tools could be effective for our student population, especially incoming undergraduates and postgraduates,” he said.

“That would be great because we could ensure the bots keep students updated on what’s happening and how they’re progressing through the admissions process. That approach would make them feel more engaged from the start.”

Also: AI agents might be the new workforce, but they still need a manager

While the multilingual capabilities could be a boon in helping the university deal with international applications, Woolley said there are many challenges to manage before agents become part of the administrative process.

“Any agent would need to have the right learning models attached to it because, otherwise, there’s the risk of bias. I ask senior managers, ‘How much failure are you prepared to accept?’ Because if we make the wrong decision, you’ll get bad coverage,” he said.

“Part of our challenge now is going back to our university executive board and our board of trustees to say, ‘If you believe there is a place for AI in our organization, where would you like to put that technology?’ Because some things will differentiate you and some things won’t.”