Dive Brief:
- Enterprises are ramping up agentic AI use and adoption plans despite identifying implementation roadblocks and areas ripe for improvement, a Cloudera report published Wednesday found. The data management vendor surveyed nearly 1,500 enterprise IT leaders earlier this year.
- Nearly all — 96% — of those surveyed plan to expand AI agent use in their organization in the next 12 months, with half preparing for widespread implementation. Businesses are most interested in performance optimization agents, followed by security monitoring agents and development assistants.
- Despite adoption ambitions, execution isn’t simple. IT leaders pointed to stronger data privacy and security features and faster training and customization as key changes they'd like to see in existing agents. Nearly 2 in 5 enterprises found integrating the technology with current systems very or extremely challenging.
Dive Insight:
IT leaders continue to express enthusiasm for AI agents as early adopters begin to hit their stride and vendors build out agentic portfolios.
Two-thirds of IT decision-makers said they are building agents on enterprise AI infrastructure platforms, and 3 in 5 point to embedded agentic capabilities in existing applications as a primary source, according to the Cloudera survey.
“Agentic AI is taking center stage, building on the momentum of generative AI but with even greater operational impact,” Cloudera Chief Strategy Officer Abhas Ricky said in a press release. Enterprises that have yet to take the leap can start with a contained, high-impact project to accelerate internal confidence and help prove ROI.
Governance is key as experiments begin, analysts have told CIO Dive. IT leaders should help their business understand what problems agents will solve, identify the guardrails needed and set up a monitoring plan.
Early adopters are finding there’s no shortage of use cases for the technology.
Google Cloud said its partners have built more than 1,000 AI agent use cases for customers across a variety of industries during its annual conference earlier this month. Organizations built more than 400,000 custom agents in Microsoft’s Copilot Studio in just three months, the cloud giant said last month, naming Estée Lauder Companies as part of the initial wave. In January, ServiceNow said it had nearly 1,000 customers using its AI agents, including EY and Rolls-Royce.
A plethora of implementation options doesn’t always make adoption easier, however. Around 7 in 10 early generative AI adopters said they have more potential use cases than they can fund, according to a Snowflake survey. The majority are struggling to decide which use case to prioritize as pressure mounts for projects to succeed.
Cloudera identified several industry-specific trends on agent adoption in its report.
Finance and insurance institutions are more likely to be using the technology to detect fraud, assess risk and advise investments. Manufacturers, meanwhile, are exploring supply chain optimization, process automation and quality control. Retailers primarily target their agentic efforts toward customer service, price optimization and demand forecasting.
