I recall working on a presentation for a 2023 conference in Greece, where I covered the topics around growth and adoption of AI in EU and Portugal, ethical AI, and the importance of training ones AI/ML models the right way.
It was the time when generative AI tools were making strides. While many leading apps made it to reaching 100 million users mark, ChatGPT, both a generative AI and a Large Language Model (LLM) tool, stood out and made headlines by achieving this milestone in just two months after its launch, showcasing the impact and potential of LLMs in accelerating digital transformation.
The Rise of Generative AI and LLMs in 2023
Prominent LLMs and some generative AI tools such as Bloom, Claude, Falcon, Llama, Bard (now Gemini), Guanaco-65B, Orca, PaLM/PaLM 2, Salesforce Einstein AI, Amazon Bedrock, and Character AI made significant advancements in conversational AI. In fact, these tools advanced conversational AI, boosting the capabilities of bots and virtual assistants. As 2023 progressed, the industry celebrated these tools for their transformative potential.
2024: The Year of AI Agents
While generative AI exploded by end of 2023, something else was also happening – the rise of AI agents. AI agents quickly gained attention for their ability to handle tasks autonomously and provide solutions across industry verticals and across business functions.
Industry leaders and experts shared their perspectives on AI agents:
- Agents are the new apps. – Dharmesh Shah, Co-Founder & CTO, HubSpot
- We’ll probably see more AI agents than there are people in the world. – Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Meta
- For the very first time, we’ll see AI agents sitting on top of the tools. – Jensen Huang, CEO, Nvidia
- AI agents will become our digital assistants, helping us navigate the complexities of the modern world. – Jeff Bezos, Executive Chairman, Amazon
- Agentic automation is the natural evolution of RPA…..Now, we’re advancing enterprise automation with agents, allowing customers to automate entire end-to-end processes and orchestrate workflows seamlessly. – Daniel Dines, Founder & CEO, UiPath
The Growth of AI Agent Technologies in Business
In 2023, companies like OpenAI , Anthropic , and Microsoft introduced the first generation of autonomous AI agents with capabilities in task management and problem-solving. This was the beginning to witness more advanced releases in 2024, where tech giants accelerated their efforts to develop AI agents tailored for enterprise applications. Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 suite and Salesforce’s ‘Agentforce’ introduced agents that autonomously manage functions in sales, finance, customer service, and more, essentially becoming the ‘new apps’ for business. Salesforce Dreamforce 2024 was all about transforming companies to AI enterprises.
Building on this momentum, SAP , Oracle , Freshworks , and Cisco have expanded their AI agent offerings. Freshworks, for instance now deploys Freddy AI agent to autonomously resolve a significant percentage of customer and IT support requests, improving both customer and employee experiences.
Microsoft is also rolling out 10 autonomous agents to complete tasks on behalf of people in areas such as sales, customer support and accounting. Ataccama that offers a unified platform for data governance, data quality and master data management (MDM) unveiled Ataccama ONE AI Agent, driving autonomous data management and smarter decision-making across applications.
The Growing AI Landscape and Promising Future
The momentum continues to build with more organizations adopting AI agents for specialized functions. In its recent report titled ‘Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2025’, Gartner ranks ‘Agentic AI’ as the #1 trend, projecting that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will feature Agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024 and enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be handled autonomously.
The Road Ahead
With the feeling that so much is already happening around AI and Agentic AI, the journey ahead will endure the following,
- If data is the new oil, then AI Agents are the engines that will augment human productivity and software application performance.
- In the coming months and years, AI Agents will mediate most all interactions with the digital world, evolving as repositories of human knowledge.
- There will be a push to continue identifying new AI use cases for new industry verticals and evolving requirements.
- While LLMs are great at identifying patterns and performing statistical analyses, they operate on huge amounts of training data without truly understanding the data they work with. Therefore, they are not the best choice for logical reasoning and for executing specific tasks without human intervention. This is where Large Action Models (LAMs) come into play acting as AI Agents.
- There are both open-source and closed source AI Agents. There’s a growing community who believe AI should remain open-source and unrestricted, given its potential to surpass human intelligence (over a period of time if not immediate) across many domains and practices. On the other hand, the trend towards closed source AI integration continues to grow.
- Awareness on AI Governance and the implementation of AI Governance frameworks will become increasingly important than ever. This is one area where companies continue to face challenges, and the ethical use of AI tools and technologies will remain a top priority to address.
- Businesses looking to investing and building a roadmap in Agentic AI would need to begin with assessing their current capabilities. This would include a detailed assessment across People (right talent, right culture, right training and certification, and right capabilities), Process (identifying right areas within existing workflows for automation, predictive analytics etc., right implementation, right enablement, right training and certification), Technology (infrastructure readiness, right tools and technologies in place, known and unknown capabilities) and Partnerships (for accelerating innovation, process collaboration, technology collaboration, shared standards and compliance).
- Ultimately, it will be process first, and technology and tools second. As AI is becoming an integral component of human interaction, or intelligent automation or digital transformation whatever you may call, the focus will boil down to business processes. AI Agents have the capability to make business processes more efficient and effective, when accompanied by targeted training, rigorous testing and iterative improvements.
But realizing their maximum potential with minimum human intervention can happen only by establishing robust foundational processes. These processes are the frameworks within which AI Agents can be trained, tested, monitored and optimized over time for incremental improvements. This is when their autonomous behavior can add both accuracy and value to businesses at the same time.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are based on current industry insights and knowledge gained through experience and are intended for educational and informational purposes only. Companies considering AI implementation and business process-led digital transformation through consulting, implementation and managed services should partner with experts in this field to ensure alignment with their goals and objectives.
Hemendhira M
VP, Marketing
