The author argues that organizations with these core disciplines will use AI agents to gain a competitive advantage, delivering better services more profitably. He also suggests that customers and employees will prefer dealing with organizations that have effective and accurate AI agents. However, he warns that without these core disciplines, deploying AI agents at scale could be a nightmare.
Key takeaways:
- AI agents are a major step forward from the copilots and chatbots that preceded them because they can work autonomously and use the resources available to them to interact with a user and create a plan that delivers an outcome.
- Organizations that can exploit agents will accelerate away from their competition. For instance, Best Buy implemented contactless curbside pickup that proved highly successful, with online sales growing 242%.
- Organizations that want to maximize agents, at scale, should master well-defined business processes, strong data governance, and comprehensive application metadata management.
- Without these core disciplines and foundations, you cannot deploy agents at scale with any confidence that they will not be a reputational, compliance and operational nightmare.