With agentic AI being the buzzword for 2025, more AI vendors are releasing new agentic tools.
Among these vendors is enterprise generative AI provider Writer, which on April 10 unveiled its AI HQ platform for enterprises to orchestrate agentic work. AI HQ provides IT and business users with tools to build, activate and supervise AI agents.
The platform includes low-code tools and a drag-and-drop interface with which to deploy autonomous AI agents. It can perform function calls to major software systems such as Adobe, Salesforce, Workday, Microsoft and Atlassian. It also has observability tools that give IT teams visibility into AI agents so that users can monitor activity and detect errors or unusual agent behaviors.
Agentic tools
The release of AI HQ comes amid an AI market flooded with agentic AI tools from hyperscalers such as Google and Microsoft as well as other vendors.
Earlier this week, Google introduced a new Agent2Agent protocol. And IT and consulting firm Accenture revealed on April 9 that it partnered with Pipefy to develop more than 450 AI agents to help change its business processes.
Writer's differentiation
Writer's differentiation in the crowded agentic AI field is that it primarily focuses on business users rather than developers, Gartner analyst Arun Chandrasekaran said.
"Their primary users are somebody who's in marketing or somebody who's in communications," he said. "It's got to be no-code, so that's an area where they're doing some work."
These kinds of systems are trying to make it easier for businesses to embrace agentic systems.
William McKeon-WhiteAnalyst, Forrester Research
Writer is trying to make it simpler for enterprises to use AI agents because of AI HQ's low-code capabilities, said William McKeon-White, an analyst at Forrester Research.
"These kinds of systems are trying to make it easier for businesses to embrace agentic systems," he said. "It lowers the skill set required to build and optimize agents and makes agentic systems overall easier to manage."
A competitive market
Because Writer is geared toward business users with specific applications such as content creation, summarization and translation, it will be hard for the 2020 startup to compete with general-purpose agentic AI builders from Microsoft or Google.
"They're talking about these systems in the right way and introducing features helpful for enterprises," McKeon-White said, adding that they even have examples of customer successes. "But competition is rapidly growing in the space."
Moreover, Chandrasekaran said, "Writer doesn't have that mindshare to be that general-purpose platform in the agent space."
He added that the best way for enterprises to ascertain which agentic platform makes sense is to look at what creates value.
"It's all about how I fundamentally believe that I have a process that can be automated using agents, where I have the confidence that the agents are going to deliver accuracy and some level of business value," Chandrasekaran said.
Finding the value of an AI system also means running an extended proof of concept to check for the agents' effectiveness and trustworthiness within their environments.
Esther Shittu is an Informa TechTarget news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems.
