While companies like OpenAI and Salesforce offer tools to build AI agents, tech leaders are struggling to understand and adapt the technology within their offerings.
GRAPEVINE, Texas -- As the session titled "What is Agentic AI and How Will the Market Evolve and Grow?" began, the room full of tech leaders trying to understand and build or adopt AI agents sought answers to the basics of agentic AI.
The concept of AI agents, or agentic AI, started to trend in 2024. During the Gartner Tech Growth and Innovation Conference this week, Gartner analyst Eric Goodness, who led the session on agentic AI, defined AI agents as "autonomous or semi-autonomous software entities that use AI techniques to perceive, make decisions, take actions and achieve goals in their digital or physical environments." While vendors bill AI agents as the next step of generative AI, business leaders looking to build and incorporate the tools within their environments are working to catch up to the hype.
Brian Tagami, senior vice president of marketing and technology services sales at technology services provider Monks and conference attendee, said tech leaders are seeking validation in how their companies interpret AI agents, invest dollars and communicate with customers.
I think we're all, I don't want to say struggling, but I think we're all seeking definition on a topic that is trending and being brought up all the time.
Brian TagamiSenior vice president of marketing and technology services sales, Monks
"I think we're all, I don't want to say struggling, but I think we're all seeking definition on a topic that is trending and being brought up all the time," he said. "This reminds me very much of early to mid-2000s, when cloud technology was coming on and everybody was throwing around a buzzword."
Tech leaders face challenge
On Tuesday, ChatGPT developer OpenAI introduced new tools for enterprise businesses to build AI agents. The company acknowledged how customers have struggled to build AI agents, and while the new tools aim to ease the challenge, it will likely still be a long road ahead for companies looking to develop their own AI agents.
Goodness, during the agentic AI session at the conference, said AI agents hold "unbelievable promise" and noted that strong use cases are emerging, pointing to companies like Beam AI and Orby AI that use AI agents to automate complex tasks for enterprises. Gartner analyst Molly Beams said during Tuesday's keynote session that over time, as businesses adopt, build and incorporate AI agents, they will "delegate more and more work to these agents, and they'll be autonomous."
However, Goodness said it will take time for the market to mature "to reach the vision that's being talked about in the market now."
He added that several problems face the aspirational goals tied to AI agents, including islands of innovation and challenges integrating AI agents that can communicate with each other.
"There are a lack of actual case studies that are enterprise-wide, where enterprises are effecting agentic AI to take and manage highly complex, cross-organization-type tasks and outcomes in the market," he said.
Though it's a technical challenge and the market's not quite there yet, Tagami said he expects exponential adoption curves for AI agents, particularly as large players develop advancements. That's why tech leaders are seeking to validate their efforts to understand and invest in the technology, he said.
"There's a lack of regulatory framework that's allowing everybody to truly understand how should we, as tech leaders, be thinking about the application and the integration into our existing tech stack," he said.
Makenzie Holland is a senior news writer covering big tech and federal regulation. Prior to joining Informa TechTarget, she was a general assignment reporter for the Wilmington StarNews and a crime and education reporter at the Wabash Plain Dealer.
