AI agents unleashed: a new era of efficiency

As the tech giants jostle in the AI investment space — and AI stocks skyrocket — there’s one AI development in particular that’s fast-expanding what AI can do for businesses: the AI agent.

I like to think of it as ‘any intelligent AI process that can act on behalf of a human to achieve a goal’. The many possibilities that such agents are now opening up have earned them a ‘beginning to see’ place in our Looking Glass ‘AI Trends to Watch’ matrix, where we’re strategically recommending their adoption.

AI agents can be autonomous to varying degrees. For example, you can give an agent a specific goal and then see how well it’s achieved it — like when you ask ChatGPT to find certain information for you, ‘web browser’ style, or use its Python capabilities to interpret data.

Or you can ask an AI agent to come up with a multi-step plan to achieve a more complex goal — which it can systematically work through with your approval. Or you can go further, beyond traditional robotic process automation (RPA) thinking, to support ongoing business processes by using corporate AI agents that are now far more adaptable and intelligent.

Thoughtworks’ project modernizing fragmented systems for a multi-play Canadian telecoms company highlights the potential of this last route. Rather than a human manually deprovisioning a service and re-commissioning it to address a customer’s problem, a fully autonomous AI agent could instead identify the issue and then solve it in the background. A semi-autonomous approach might involve a customer service rep identifying a problem and then instructing the AI agent to implement a suggested solution.

But it’s perhaps an AI agent’s ability to interface with corporate systems and real-world data via APIs that, for me, is one of the most interesting current developments. OpenAI’s GPT models, paired with Zapier to connect to 6,000+ corporate systems including Trello and Jira, is one example, and there are others such as Amazon’s Bedrock platform and Google’s Duet AI.

Originally published at https://www.thoughtworks.com.