Embracing Agentic AI: Opportunities and Obstacles

• Majority of employees are engaging with AI agents
• High interest in agentic AI among IT leaders
• Persistent challenges hinder widespread adoption

In today's fast-paced business environment, artificial intelligence (AI) is steadily becoming a staple within organizational operations. Companies are increasingly eager to delegate more tasks to AI's autonomous capabilities.

Recent findings from Pega show that a significant three in five workers (58%) are currently utilizing AI agents. Correspondingly, research by UiPath reveals that an overwhelming majority of IT executives (93%) express a high level of interest in agentic AI. UiPath further reports that over two-thirds (69%) of IT executives are already employing or are planning to employ AI agents in the coming months—a figure closely aligned with Pega’s statistics.

The Evolution Towards Agentic AI

Artificial intelligence has already demonstrated its potential to save employees several hours each week by automating routine, repetitive tasks. Workers are enthusiastic about AI agents' ability to enhance task automation, streamline meeting summaries, improve oversight of business workflows, and minimize the time spent hunting for work-related information.

Despite major players like Salesforce investing heavily in agentic AI, businesses encounter recurring challenges that stymie full-scale deployment. These are akin to the hurdles faced with traditional AI implementation.

According to UiPath, IT executives express concerns over IT security (56%), costs associated with implementation (37%), and integration issues with current systems (35%). Meanwhile, Pega identifies a broad lack of confidence in AI’s ability to autonomously replicate human efforts, citing disparities in AI's work quality (33%) and its deficiency in human-like intuition and emotional intelligence (32%). The fallibility of AI-generated responses (30%) further exacerbates mistrust.

Daniel Dines, CEO of UiPath, underscores the necessity for enterprises to balance AI autonomy with human oversight to avert negative outcomes and to ensure compliance with ethical and legal standards. He emphasizes that as AI systems gain autonomy, firms must adopt methods to reconcile these elements effectively.

Looking forward, a clear imperative emerges for enhanced education and transparency to facilitate the adoption of agentic AI, accompanied by strategic reflections on harmonizing AI independence with human supervision.

Pega's survey indicates that nearly half (46%) of respondents anticipate AI will have a beneficial impact on their professional roles within the next five years. "Organizations must align AI agents with genuine workflows," advises Pega CTO Don Schuerman, "to ensure the agents contribute value by executing not just any work, but the right work."