Feature
Managers — if agentic AI vendors have their way, some of your newest team members won’t be human, they’ll be AI agents. While that might seem futuristic, the truth is AI agents are already at work at companies you’re familiar with.
At Thomson Reuters they speed legal due diligence, completing some tasks in half the time or faster than their human counterparts. McKinsey and Company partnered with Microsoft to build AI agents to reduce client onboarding time by 90% and administrative work by 30%. Unlike bots or apps of the past, these AI agents are able to carry out tasks such as answering new client inquiries and having conversations much like a human. Not only that, but they can also make sales and marketing calls, compose and send personalized, contextual emails and more.
AI Agents Act Like Employees
While Thomson Reuters and McKinsey worked with a large technology partner to develop those solutions, many AI agent builders are new, or reborn, startups whose agents have human personas and complete the kind of work currently done by your colleagues. Some vendors are pitching these agents as headcount instead of something IT buys. Others are billing for work “products.”
“We’re delivering a workforce that produces results. By selling work instead of software, we’re at the forefront of a SaaS transformation that prioritizes outcomes over tools” is 11x.ai’s pitch.
“Grow your business, not your headcount” offers Relevance AI’s website.
And get this, 11x.ai’s digital SDR (sales development representative) agent, Alice, works 24/7 and can supposedly engage every buyer on earth in real time. That’s something that your whole team of SDR’s probably can’t do.
“AI is capable of adopting more, and new kinds of data. The cost of LLM is going down and the quality has gone up,” Ryan Cox, global head of artificial intelligence at Synechon, told Reworked. He offers these reasons to explain why AI agents and agentic AI are suddenly seeming to be a big deal.
“We are moving into the agentic AI phase right now,” Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, told Reworked. “And yes, agents are more autonomous than the copilots we’ve seen so far. It’s a shift from augmenting the human in a supervised way to autonomous assistance through an agent,” he added. Mueller then added a word of caution, “There is a lot of agent washing, where everybody re-labels automation as agents.”
Related Article: LinkedIn Joins the AI Agent Trend With Launch of Hiring Assistant
What Is Agentic AI?
Unlike traditional bots that can only respond with pre-programmed answers when they detect specific keywords, AI agents are more sophisticated. Powered by large language models (like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and others) agentic AIs can understand and respond to conversations with little to no human oversight, much like a smart co-worker would.
Instead of just matching keywords to responses, agents analyze context, draw connections and generate unique responses based on vast amounts of training data. They also adjust those responses as circumstances change.
Think of them as highly knowledgeable assistants who can handle complex tasks — ranging from crafting personalized multi-channel marketing messages, answering detailed product questions or engaging in conversations. This is why companies are increasingly turning to AI agents to handle tasks that previously required human workers.
Promising as the capabilities of AI agents are, “it’s still early days,” Mueller said. That’s a sentiment echoed by Cox, who said that the circumstances around agentic AI are such that its capabilities will grow quickly.
Related Article: Generative AI: Two Years of Promise, Progress and Pitfalls
Pay for Action and Success
A real world example of agentic AI in practice is customer support agent FIN 2 (aka FIN) by Intercom. These AI-powered agents don’t just respond to customer queries; they can proactively follow workflows, such as handling entire troubleshooting sequences, escalating issues and gathering customer feedback.
“Fin 2 is the first AI agent that delivers human quality service. That has been our mission and it can do it,” Intercom’s chief product officer Paul Adams told attendees of Pioneer, the company’s user conference.
What’s interesting about Fin 2, besides its capabilities, is its pricing. A resolved case costs $.99 cents. An unresolved case is routed to the correct human agent and costs you nothing. Worth noting is that Fin 2 is available only to Intercom’s 25,000 plus platform customers.
Pactum AI, is an AI negotiation platform designed to automate complex processes. Its algorithms analyze contracts, spot negotiation opportunities and craft agreements that benefit both parties. This automation speeds up negotiations, allowing teams to focus on strategic goals rather than time-intensive back-and-forths.
Pactum, which counts Walmart among its customers, offers two licensing options: an annual fee of $120,000 for a three-year contract, with an additional 25% of the first-year gains (minus the license fee), or a $120,000 annual license with a fee ranging from $600 to $6,500 per successful negotiation.
Salesforce made headlines twice in the last month, first when it introduced Agentforce and then again when it announced that it would hire 1000 salespeople to sell the product.
Salesforce defines AI agents as “autonomous, proactive applications designed to execute specialized tasks to help employees and customers.” Agentforce users can create agents on their own or start with one that has been pre-built, such as the 24/7 Sales Development Representative (SDR) which automates early-stage prospecting, or the AI Sales Coach which creates customized training scenarios for sales teams by analyzing their actual Salesforce opportunities and deal history as well as many other pre-configured agents. Prices range from free to $2 per conversation for Agentforce or $50 per user/per month for the sales coach to the cost of an enterprise agreement.
Mueller, who's taken a close look at Agentforce, thinks the company has taken the right approach out of the large enterprise vendors. "They are the only ones," he said, adding that what’s left to question is how long it will take other enterprise vendors to catch up.
Related Article: First Time Managers Need Help. Is AI the Answer?
AI Agents Everywhere
For those who remember the web 2.0 boom, the era of agentic AI might blow it away. According to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, there have been at least 4,600 active AI startups as of April 2024. If the past is any indication of the future, it’s probably fair to say that that more than half of them won’t still be around in 2034. Here are a few that have gotten some hype, but we have no indication as to their future.
Outbound: Agentic Sales Development Reps, Business Development Reps
There are hundreds of digital AI agents ready to take on the work of your outbound team. Some of these AI agents like Alice, Alisha, Ava, Bosh and many others work 24x7, may have access to people that your current teams do not, can personalize content, book meetings and have human-like discussions on demand. Of course, they don’t want to replace any of your current employees but to instead free colleagues to do higher value work.
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It’s worth noting that there are hundreds of other AI BDR, SDR AI agent makers like AISDR, Regie, Rhinestone and others. Worth noting that some are not a fit for small companies (and the vendors will tell you this) because you have to throw a lot of data at the bot to achieve success. Prices are as high as $50,0000. Some of these vendors want to include your LinkedIn connections as targets.
Productivity AI Agents
If the agentic prognosticators are right, everyone will soon have a digital assistant by their side. Glean develops AI-powered search and knowledge management tools for enterprises, focusing on creating AI assistants, chatbots and APIs for customers to build their own AI agents, with enhanced security and permissions built in. Sem4 enables enterprises to build, run and operate AI agents at scale. Writer will help add generative AI agents into “any” business process. The company is positioning itself as a "productivity engine" for enterprises, offering AI agents that can perform tasks such as searching, researching, programming and creating content.
