The dawn of agentic AI
Orchestration, governance, and best practices
AI agents are ushering in a new era of digital labor, with autonomous systems now capable of understanding context, making decisions, and executing tasks, often without human intervention. While enterprises are seeing an increase in the number of agents and the roles that these agents perform, this proliferation brings both significant opportunities and complex challenges.
Key takeaways
- Adoption of AI agents is rising, bringing new opportunities and new governance challenges.
- Robust orchestration, proactive management, and planning are essential for secure, unified enterprise deployment as agent adoption and complexity grow.
- Lessons from cloud and API proliferation highlight the need for early oversight.
- Human ingenuity and judgment remain essential as agents scale and automate more tasks.
Innovation, oversight, and the value of change management
Much like the early move to cloud computing and application programming interfaces (APIs), the rapid adoption of AI agents is fueling transformational change, not to mention substantial complexity. Since costs and risks are likely to rise sharply, orchestration and governance should be considered early, making proactive integration and oversight essential for scalable success.
As AI agents become more prevalent, human ingenuity and judgment will continue to play a key role in selecting and guiding agent outputs, ensuring that technology decisions align with business goals and customer needs as workplaces continue to evolve.
The adoption of AI agents brings both speed and complexity
Enterprises rushing to experiment with agentic AI are rapidly increasing their digital footprint, highlighting tangible risks amid growing complexity and limited orchestration.
more applications are deployed, on average, by organizations using AI agents compared to those that do not.
New horizons await
As organizations embark on their agentic journey, the landscape of best practices is still being shaped. Forward-looking companies should aim not just for predictable automation, but for surprising, transformative outcomes that unlock new possibilities. By focusing on thoughtful orchestration and human judgment, organizations can unleash the full potential of AI agents and confidently explore this innovative, rapidly developing landscape.
Beena Ammanath
Kurt Anderson
