Businesses Focus Areas For AI And AI Agents Deployment

As AI and AI agents face an ROI test, some companies are focusing on specific business areas instead of enterprise-wide AI adoption.

GFT Technology’s new report ‘The Future of AI, Unfiltered’ found that 90% of respondents are concerned that global investment in AI may be growing faster than the business value it can realistically deliver,

Focusing on specific business areas allows companies to better understand the risks of an AI or AI agent project, where it can be deployed, how it impacts the workforce and help to better build governance and ownership while allowing companies to measure ROI and other benefits more effectively.

This report looks into four distinct business areas for AI and AI agent deployment: legacy tech, payments and payroll, HR coaching and real estate and CPG retail operations.

How Companies Deploy AI and AI Agents to Modernize Legacy Tech

Legacy technology found across a wide range of industries, from banking to biotech to critical services like food, water and energy, limits AI and agentic deployment. GFT’s survey found that almost all of those surveyed (95%) said legacy systems cause a delay in their organization’s ability to deploy and scale AI. More than half (56%) described that delay as moderate or major.

More importantly, 84% reported canceling at least one AI pilot or project due to limitations in their legacy systems, and almost all 93% believe running AI on their organization’s legacy tech stacks would eventually trigger an enterprise-wide security crisis.

“When we talk about legacy systems, we’re not simply referring to old technology,” Marco Santos, global CEO, GFT Technologies, told me. “We’re talking about technology that has become difficult to evolve, integrate, secure, or scale at the speed that business now requires,” said Santos.

“Legacy is rarely one single system,” said Santos. “In large enterprises, it’s usually an interconnected estate across core applications, integration layers, data environments and infrastructure.”