AI Agents Are the Next Wave of Enterprise AI

What’s Next for AI Agents?

There are a few simple reasons why AI agents are viewed as the next big thing in tech.

First, AI’s biggest draw is its potential to increase productivity. Rather than having an employee spend time conducting mundane tasks such as monitoring channels and data entry, an AI agent can take care of it, freeing the employee to work on bigger projects. AI’s ability to simplify time-consuming tasks is already impressive, but what will the next iteration of AI agents be able to do? Where will the technology be in just a few short years? 

Second, there is a race among major tech companies to be leaders in the AI space. While Microsoft has invested in OpenAI, Apple has its own partnership with the ChatGPT maker, and we’ve seen other tech giants make competing moves. 

AWS recently hired top executives from Adept, an AI agent startup, and is licensing the company’s AI technology. Amazon has also invested heavily in Anthropic, an AI startup and OpenAI competitor. With multiple major companies investing heavily in a single technology, we can expect to see rapid developments and innovation.

Third, we’ve seen glimpses into the future of AI thanks to demos and plans shared by some of the world’s biggest tech brands. For example, in a recent Google Gemini demo, the AI agent was tasked with returning a pair of sneakers. It searched through the user’s email inbox for a receipt, identified the order number of the sneakers, filled out a return form, and arranged for the sneakers to be picked up at a scheduled time, all without any additional user prompts or intervention.

Self-driving cars are a version of embodied AI agents, which are AI systems integrated with a physical body such as a robot, car, or drone. Some major companies are developing embodied AI agent robots today. While we could picture these embodied agents as ticket merchants and bank tellers, NVIDIA is working toward AI agent robots in the operating room. The company has also developed robots that can teach each other physical tasks such as opening doors and drawers. 

Not only is the potential to significantly boost enterprise productivity a reason for companies to invest in AI but in many instances, companies don’t will be at a competitive disadvantage. Making the investment in infrastructure to adopt AI agents will allow organizations to get a leg up on competitors who don’t do the same. And as large tech vendors continue to invest in AI development, and open-source software developers continue to stretch their capabilities, the potential for what AI agents can do will only grow.