Seizing the agentic AI advantage

Nearly eight in ten companies report using gen AI—yet just as many report no significant bottom-line impact.¹ Think of it as the “gen AI paradox.”

Byline

About the authors

• At the heart of this paradox is an imbalance between “horizontal” (enterprise-wide) copilots and chatbots—which have scaled quickly but deliver diffuse, hard-to-measure gains—and more transformative “vertical” (function-specific) use cases—about 90 percent of which remain stuck in pilot mode.
• AI agents offer a way to break out of the gen AI paradox. That’s because agents have the potential to automate complex business processes—combining autonomy, planning, memory, and integration—to shift gen AI from a reactive tool to a proactive, goal-driven virtual collaborator.
• This shift enables far more than efficiency. Agents supercharge operational agility and create new revenue opportunities.
• But unlocking the full potential of agentic AI requires more than plugging agents into existing workflows. It calls for reimagining those workflows from the ground up—with agents at the core.

Foreword

Organizations will also need to set up the foundation to effectively operate in the agentic era. They will need to upskill the workforce, adapt the technology infrastructure, accelerate data productization, and deploy agent-specific governance mechanisms. The moment has come to bring the gen AI experimentation chapter to a close—a pivot only the CEO can make. or delete it, then start writing!

A new AI architecture paradigm—the agentic AI mesh—is needed to govern the rapidly evolving organizational AI landscape and enable teams to blend custom-built and off-the-shelf agents while managing mounting technical debt and new classes of risk. But the bigger challenge won’t be technical. It will be human: earning trust, driving adoption, and establishing the right governance to manage agent autonomy and prevent uncontrolled sprawl.

To scale impact in the agentic era, organizations must reset their AI transformation approaches from scattered initiatives to strategic programs; from use cases to business processes; from siloed AI teams to cross-functional transformation squads; and from experimentation to industrialized, scalable delivery.