Businesses are rapidly moving to implement AI-enabled solutions and are expanding their AI spending, even as tools and strategies evolve. A significant 78% of organizations are expected to increase their overall AI spending in the next fiscal year, according to a recent report from Deloitte, with Generative AI investments making up the majority of the increase.  

Deloitte’s study also notes that some business areas are progressing further ahead than others when it comes to using GenAI in terms of “integration, ROI, and expectations.” While IT function is “most mature” in their AI adoption, other company departments, including operations, marketing and customer service, are “showing strong adoption and results.”

Meanwhile, McKinsey recently reported that most C-suite executives expect that it will take three to five years for their organizations to realize the complete value of their GenAI investments. 

Industry observers continue to watch key trends when it comes to AI tools and strategies, including employing agentic AI – or AI agents – to expand and advance business process improvement and other day-to-day operations. Here’s a closer look at agentic AI and several current use cases spanning various industries.

Agentic AI is trending

In nearly every industry, businesses are now looking to employ agentic AI solutions to transform their AI strategies. While Generative AI is focused on the output of content, Agentic AI is focused on autonomous decision-making, bringing new possibilities for many business areas and functions, such as customer service, retail sales and HR. 

Agentic AI systems are “designed to autonomously make decisions and act” with “limited supervision,” according to IBM. These systems combine various aspects of machine learning, large language models and natural language processing to make more complex decisions. They also work in conjunction with GenAI tools. 

Technology companies including Appian, Atlassian, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow and Workday have all launched “service-oriented AI agents in 2024” to manage and implement tasks and experiences, according to a report in CIO.com. 

Along with the advances of agentic AI, organizations must also be aware of the inherent risks involved with employing AI agents. A recent report in the World Economic Forum outlines some of these inherent and potential risks of AI agents. 

Potential risks include both technical limitations and ethical concerns that can arise when systems reach a certain level of autonomy—these range from technical errors to security issues, as well as the elimination of jobs. Plus, there are additional ethical considerations around decision-making from AI agents, including bias in areas such as hiring and HR practices, insurance and lending. These risks are why human interaction needs to remain a key part of agentic AI.

Current popular use cases for AI in business process management

Currently, a few use cases leveraging agentic AI and other AI-enabled solutions involve front office and daily business process improvement. Here are some of the popular use cases that businesses are employing. 

Sales  

More than 80% of sales teams are either experimenting with or have fully implemented AI, according to a 2024 study released by Salesforce.  And according to their research, “83% of sales teams with AI saw revenue growth this year vs. 66% without AI.”

Some of the potential benefits of using AI in sales processes include:

• Faster predictive analytics for sales personalization and behaviors
• Rapid analysis of customer feedback 
• Increased accuracy in forecasting with sales and behavioral data 

Implementing AI solutions can also free up sales teams from repetitive manual tasks. 

Customer Service 

GenAI has been transforming customer service through more powerful chatbots. But agentic AI goes even further in enhancing retail shopping experiences and other customer experiences. 

On their own, GenAI tools are making chatbots more customer-friendly and conversational, providing better experiences. When adding AI agents into the mix, these tools have the potential to help retail businesses give their customers even more enhanced experiences, including additional product searches and inventory management.

For instance, agentic AI often leverages natural language processing (NLP) to analyze “unstructured data sources such as customer feedback and social media posts to extract valuable insights,” as TechTarget notes. 

Along with enhanced speed and accuracy, providing automated customer service options also frees up customer service representatives to handle more complex cases directly. 

AI-enabled Intelligent document management 

Intelligent document management uses AI for enhanced document processing and management tasks. With AI-enabled intelligent document management, systems such as machine learning and NLP are employed to organize and process documents in a document management system. This results in time savings with faster and more accurate workflows.

With intelligent document management, organizations can quickly and efficiently classify documents, organize documents and data, extract data and tag metadata significantly faster than with manual approaches. AI-enabled document management also supports advanced search capabilities within documents to improve information retrieval. These solutions can provide more security via encryption and access controls, set up to identify sensitive information or data and protect this information. 

When applied to document processing, GenAI solves more processing issues than Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or older AI, for example, according to one report from StarCIO. “With traditional OCR and AI models, you might get 60% straight-through processing, 70% if you’re lucky, but now generative AI solves all of the edge cases, and your processing rates go up to 99%,” according to the report.

AI-enabled document processing solutions can also result in significant time savings in reviewing legal documents, along with huge gains in efficiency for state and local agencies that process huge volumes of documents daily.

Agentic AI presents exciting opportunities for businesses to streamline processes, enhance efficiency and drive innovation. However, as with any transformative technology, organizations must approach its implementation thoughtfully. By balancing AI automation with human oversight, businesses can harness its full potential while mitigating risks, ensuring responsible and ethical AI adoption that benefits both companies and their customers.