Why Enterprise AI Agents Require More Than A Technology Strategy

AI agents in software no longer answer questions. Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and ServiceNow have announced AI agents that move between company systems and complete tasks for employees. The harder question belongs to leadership: how much work should employees hand over?

What The Vendors Have Announced

Salesforce made its redesigned Slackbot generally available in January, making Slack the place where employees access company information, workflows, and agents. Microsoft introduced Copilot Cowork in March to complete routine and multistep work across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Google followed in October, announcing its Gemini agent for work, along with coworker agents with their own identities that can join team projects and perform tasks just like an employee. ServiceNow’s personal agent with NVIDIA’s OpenShell is meant to let agents do the work while company policy limits what they can see and do.

Some of those safeguards still depend on system integrations. Oracle announced agentic applications for finance and supply chain in April, and SAP is adding agents across finance, HR, and supply chain work.

The products differ in what they can do and how mature they are. Each puts an agent between employees and the systems they use, creating a dependency risk. Whoever sets up the AI agent tool an employee opens first can shape how work flows, who can see company data, and what the company buys next.

Executives must carefully evaluate which AI agents they adopt and ensure their business strategy drives how their organization operates vs. a vendor’s roadmap.

Fix The Work Before You Automate It

Finance has its systems, sales has its own, and hospitals run on the electronic health record. Employees move between them all day. An agent could do that legwork and hand back finished work to review.

Saving Time Is Not An ROI

Many AI business cases use time savings to justify return on investment (ROI). But time savings don’t necessarily translate into better business performance.