The waves of advanced AI technologies are coming faster than we can imagine, and the latest wave of Agentic AI is transforming business operations across industries. Artificial intelligence technology is now widely used to automate repetitive and mundane tasks, power innovation and creativity, and enhance customer service experience. s
However, a strong guardrail around this technology is required to achieve true success.
The next wave of AI, aka Agentic AI, is here. AI agents also use the same technology that powers AI chatbots, however, these AI agents are able to make decisions, take actions, collaborate, and perform larger objectives on their own, without much human intervention. They can take over entire business workflows.
Wide Range Adoption of Top AI Agents
Standard Bank, Thomson Reuters, Zurich Insurance, Virgin Money, and over 100,000 other organizations are using Copilot Studio, Microsoft announced in October last year.
Copilot Studio is one of the finest AI agents, widely used by enterprises to build autonomous agents that can connect CRM systems, HR systems, or other platforms.
Apart from offering AI agents built for specific purposes and use cases, Microsoft, in November, released Azure AI Agent Service. This fully managed service helps organizations build, deploy, and scale their agents conveniently and quickly.
Similarly, AWS offers Amazon Bedrock Agents (available since 2023), which are now equipped with multi-agent collaboration capabilities.
This doesn’t stop here; apart from Microsoft and AWS, there are several other major players that are into the game, such as CrewAI or UiPath, that are pure-play agentic AI platform providers.
Salesforce also joined the race with its Agentforce in October, which is now upgraded to Agentforce 2.0. This upgraded version comes with a library of pre-built skills and workflow integration. It also has support for Slack and offers better reasoning capability.
Top AI Agent Business Use Cases
Here are how organizations can use AI agents to boost various business operations.
Software Development and IT
Cognition’s Devin was launched in March last year as the first AI software engineer. While most of the AI tools couldn’t even score 5% on the SWE-bench (a benchmark designed to check how AI can solve real-world coding problems), Devin scored 14% on it. Today, we have AI software that could score even 60% easily. For example, OpenAI’s o3 model (yet to be launched) scored 72% on this test.
It shouldn’t be surprising that over 60% of executives, according to a Capgemini survey (mid 2024), believe AI agents will be handling most of the coding tasks in the next 3-5 years from now.
Mitre is already using its own AI agent for code repository management, including bug fixes and modernizing legacy systems.
Though these tools are efficient and commercial models are rigorously tested, human oversight will always remain an important factor to maintain accuracy. A Langbase ‘State of AI Agents Report’ highlighted that the top use case for AI agents is software development (87%), along with a significant LLM adoption in IT and operations (48%).
Automation and Productivity
The next biggest application of AI Agent is automation. Let's understand this with the case of Avantia, a global law firm. It uses commercial as well as open-source generative AI for its agents. They use Microsoft AI agent integrated with Outlook and Word that can access their documents and historical records and help attorneys do the contracting process, respond to customers, and transactions faster.
SS&C, a financial services and healthcare technology company, is another example of using AI agents to automate its business processes. It receives millions of documents monthly from 20,000 customers in various formats and requires context understanding, which is important for automation.
Generative AI is helping them overcome this challenge, finds Brian Halpin, their senior managing director of automation. They now have 20 production use cases for AI agents that handle documents securely in the cloud using models like Meta’s Llama.
Customer Service
Customer service without AI agents in today’s customer-centric business environment feels so outdated now.
AI agents can automate routine tasks, provide instant support, personalize responses, as well as provide 24/7 support to enhance the customer service experience.
One of the classic examples is Dun & Bradstreet, where AI agents help customers to understand and interact with huge amounts of information that this research company collects worldwide.
Gary Kotovets, chief data and analytics officer, highlights that around 90% of the Fortune 500 companies use their data to make important business decisions, such as credit decisions and supply chain decisions, along with sales and marketing.
Content Creation
Automating tasks like research, outlining, and drafting various content formats, including text, images, videos, etc., AI agents can greatly help with content creation. They can assist with content personalization, optimize it for SEO, and even refine existing content for greater efficiency. They are also highly useful in powering innovation.
Langbase survey reported 59% of respondents use it to generate or summarize text, followed by 50% of respondents using it for marketing and communication. EY uses advanced AI agents for its third-party risk management service.
HR and Employee Support
AI agents offer a low-risk, high-value solution for internal employee support, with 43% of companies using them for HR (IBM Survey).
Indicium is a data services firm, and it started deploying AI agents in mid-2024 as the technology matured, taking advantage of the readily available AI models. Their agents work as specialized microservices within a multi-agent system and help HR to retrieve knowledge, tagging, documentation, and other HR processes.
These prompt-based interactions can, of course, be prone to hallucinations and may require careful tuning, but they provide business benefits by autonomously handling queries and identifying areas of improvement in business processes through undocumented findings.
AI agents are no longer the future; they are revolutionizing industries now!
Organizations, big and small, have started recognizing the power of advanced AI models and revolutionary AI agents. Any industry you name can immensely benefit from these technologies with proper implementation.
This has boosted the demand for skilled AI professionals at all levels, including AI engineers, Data Scientists, AI Leaders, and other essential AI job roles. These professionals are required to address the pressing challenges related to the development and use of AI models.
A career in AI is highly rewarding and prosperous. So, enroll in top AI certifications from USAII® and learn the art of making and deploying AI agents to boost your organizational processes.
