- In a Deloitte survey, 26% of the leaders said that their organizations seriously explored autonomous agents.
- ServiceNow, SAP and Salesforce belong to the companies that have debuted AI agents to perform work tasks.
- This article is part of “AI in Action”, a series that investigates how companies implement AI innovations.
When customers of the Cloud-based software provider ServiceNow contact the customer service of the company, 80% of the cases-in the form of calls and chat messages-without human are handled.
Instead, the company trusts analytical and generative artificial intelligence – in the form of AI agents – to answer many questions from customers.
Chris Bedi, Chief Customer Officer and Enterprise-AI advisor of Serviceenow, said that employees still support one in five requests from customers.
They receive new support from Agentic AI, who can automate tasks, such as drawing up a response -e -mail to a customer. Employees will stay informed for a final cancellation before agent-AI actions are carried out. The combination of human employees and agent AI Kromp the amount of time needed to process the more complex cases by 52% in a period of two weeks, Said Servicenow said.
OpenAi’s co -founder Sam Altman and other leading technologists have said that 2025 will be the year that AI agents “participate in the staff”.
In addition to ServiceNow, software developers such as Salesforce and SAP have rolled out their own agentic-AI platforms. These can perform work plikes, such as processing customer invoices, offering customer support to customers and drawing up Emails. The Business Software Giant Intuit, which owns Turbotax and Quickbooks, began to roll out Agentic-AI options in December.
For the time being, people will be informed for the time being, but sellers expect this technology to become completely autonomous. Multiagent systems, where two or more AI agents work together to complete work will spread.
“Agents are the next level of understanding of how you apply AI,” said Jim Rowan, the head of AI at the Consultancy Deloitte. “It can perform actions for you.”
In a recent study by Deloitte among 2,773 managers, 26% of the respondents said that their organizations explored an “large or high degree of autonomous agents.
Why AI agents have become the new focus for generative AI
During the first two years of the generative-AI-Boom Die, after the debut of OpenAi’s Chatgpt in the end of 2022, most companies that have taken over the technology reduced it to chatbots and complete routine tasks such as the preparation of summaries. AI agents represent an evolution of generative AI technology, built to complete tasks autonomously, although most are still closely followed by employees.
Agentic AI “actually owns some unique skills around reasoning, plans and orchestration,” Bedi told Business Insider. “These agents can work together and are really starting to make the promise of work.”
BUZZ for AI agents made a high gear after Salesforce debuted Agentforce in September to automate tasks in customer support, sales and marketing. The company has said that by the end of this year it will roll out 1 billion agents to customers. The company also reported that more than 340,000 of his questions from customer support were autonomously answered with Agentforce.
ServiceNow estimates that the AI agents of the company, already in different parts of the company, such as customer service, human resources, and IT, encourage an estimated $ 325 million in annual value by strengthening the productivity of the workplace by 20%. Servicenow says that AI-agent supports work 400,000 working hours annually.
Nevertheless, technology companies are located in the early stages of their development of agentic-ai. Many are finding out which processes they can fully automate with the technology. As a result, business leaders who implement agentic AI implement their employees to collaborate with – and to give feedback about – their new ‘colleagues’.
AI agents are often developed as aids for employees.
John Kucera, the senior vice -president of product management at Salesforce, ordered that companies are transparent about what work AI agents can handle and what will stay with employees. He added that companies should be clear about what an AI agent actually is and say that not all agent systems are the same.
“There are many false agents who are there,” said Kucera. “It is only an agent when you apply for a request and the agent is figuring out what to do and then what data he must place.”
Although surveys often discover that many employees are concerned that AI will replace them, technologists say that AI agents will not replace people, but take responsibility for everyday tasks.
“These agents are going to help me do my job, but at no point will they do something that I am not aware of,” said Walter Sun, the worldwide head of AI at SAP, which sells software for financial, supply chain and other needs on business management. “The most important thing is that employees always have control.”
How companies tailor AI agents to feedback from employees
To ensure that employees have a voice about how AI agents are being developed, SAP encourages employees in his various business lines including the provider of the travel and expense management and success factors, which offers HR, Payroll and Talent Management software- to use an internal online form to reach the AI team. Team team.
With Intuit, the AI-driven financial assistant Intuit Assist can have companies pay 45% faster by detecting factices for the past and automatically preparing a personalized reminder letter. After a business owner has approved the language of the memorandum and sends it out, they are paid on average five days earlier than with a process for people alone, Intuit Assist said.
But before Inuit Assist takes action, people have the last word. “What we are trying to do is have the right interaction between people and automation,” said Ashok Srivastava, Chief Data Officer of Intuit.
Intuit has embraced a robust AI training program, aimed at responsible AI and what the technology can and cannot do, and a “sandbox” built called Genstudio with which employees can communicate with large language models in a safe environment. The company has also developed educational programs that are tailored to senior executives, directors and engineers. “It is very omnipresent throughout the company,” Srivastava added.
Asana, which makes work management software, launched AI agents in October and focused on some functions, including Marketing, IT, HR and research and development. Instead of keeping track of a specific number of actions that Agentic AI takes over, Asana monitors the types of work that can be automated, thereby eliminating the grind of busy work to concentrate employees on more complex tasks.
The company also keeps a close eye on which tasks AI systems are wrong compared to people. In cyber security, human errors usually appear later in the day when employees are tired after a long service. AI does not get tired, but it is susceptible to hallucinations – or when an AI model generates a reaction that is misleading or false information, but nevertheless presents it as a fact. For example, the AI agent from Asana can respond to certain questions by proposing tasks that do not actually exist to a certain workflow.
“The types of errors we see are different, so the way we repair them must be different,” said Asana’s Chief Information Security Officer, Sean Cassidy. He said that the company performs automated tests to detect hallucinations and improve the product when they occur.
For AI agents to create an attractive return on the investment for the companies they implement, Rowan Van Deloitte said, employees must be given the task of regularly checking simple automated tasks before agent AI actions are being undertaken.
If companies want to see a major return on their agentic AI investment, they must place AI in the center of their work model and then consider how people will deal with work, Rowan said. If not, “the savings will really not be there,” he added.
The Bedi van Serviceenow said that the success of AI agents depends on companies that have three factors: new agentic possibilities must be developed for each department and its specific needs, unique training plans must be designed for each part of the company – such as finance, marketing and sales – and the value and return of agentic workflows must be closely followed.
“The companies that combine all three of those ingredients will have a competitive advantage,” said Bedi.
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