Agentic AI is impacting every part of an organisation, from customer journeys to back office, supply chains and software engineering. Everything is changing at an accelerating speed, all at the same time, everywhere, all at once. In response, organisations don’t want drawn-out analysis engagements with consultants or long strategy projects; they want action. They want to quickly and safely deploy agents to production and deliver value fast.

The challenge: Ambiguity slows progress

The almost ubiquitous opportunities for agentic-enabled transformation mean lots of opportunity for ambiguity, and that slows adoption down. Good leadership, clear direction setting and communication are all staples of providing clarity for an organisation. Additionally, I have found that there is a specific way to frame agentic that helps organisations more successfully deploy and adopt agents; being clear on the category of agents they are deploying.

The four categories of agentic adoption

Broadly, they fall into four categories: co-working tools to enhance employee productivity; op model and business transformation tools, like workflow automation; embedding new AI features in existing apps and digital products; and AI-enabled software engineering.

Co-working tools: Empowering employees

Let us take co-working tools first. These tools are being rolled out across organisations and employees are being encouraged to create documents, automate parts of their job, research sales numbers, create commercial plans, interrogate financial numbers, etc. There are both productivity and revenue growth opportunities here, and it is largely crowd-sourced. Innovation is firmly in the hands of employees, and the value is directly linked to people adopting new tools and ways of working. You need to deploy agents safely and give people access to data on a secure platform, but you also need to continually educate people on the art of the possible.

Business transformation: Redesigning operations

Secondly, agents are being used to create value through op model redesign and business transformation, which is in the hands of management. These are strategic plays to deliver significant value, either from productivity gains or generating additional revenue. They require cross-department co-ordination, significant investment in change management and a drive from the top to reimagine how work gets done. Adoption hinges on an organisation’s ability to drive change through.

Enhancing apps and products: Adding AI features

Thirdly, whether it’s building AI features in an existing business app, SaaS product or customer product, using agents to enhance customer or employee experience is a good thing, but it isn’t where the big productivity gains sit. Unless you’re automating large parts of your workflow or customer journey, that’s more likely to be a business transformation play. Protecting your market from emerging competitors or delivering new features that delight your customers and enhance revenues is a good reason to adopt this new tech, but make sure you’re doing it for the value added, not just because you can.

AI-enabled software engineering: Accelerating delivery

The final category is software engineering, or more accurately, AI enabling the software development lifecycle (SDLC). As a software engineering firm, this has been something a lot of our customers have asked us to help with. Over the last year, it has accelerated to the most popular use case. We have worked with customers to achieve 3x velocity in feature delivery, brought delivery times in by 50% and reduced costs by hundreds of thousands of pounds. The art with this category of agent adoption is looking at the full lifecycle, as it’s often the other parts of the SDLC that are the throttle points: requirements gathering and testing being the top two consistent offenders.

Focus for faster adoption

In summary, adopting agentic can be accelerated if you are clear on the category of agentic transformation you are pursuing and adjust your approach accordingly. You are probably deploying more than one type, but being clear will help you focus on the most appropriate actions, speed up adoption and ultimately help you deliver value quicker.