Companies are more and more testing the waters with AI brokers, however belief points persist.
A survey by integration platform Workato and Harvard Enterprise Overview of greater than 600 tech leaders discovered that almost all respondents discover brokers extra reliable outdoors of core enterprise areas, whereas simply 6% stated they totally belief brokers with important end-to-end enterprise processes. However that hasn’t curbed curiosity: 86% stated their firms plan to take a position extra in agentic AI over the subsequent two years.
Greater than two in 5 (43%) of respondents stated they solely belief brokers with routine operational duties, 39% stated they delegate brokers to “supervised use cases or complex, noncore processes,” and eight% stated they don’t belief brokers with enterprise operations in any respect.
As AI techniques that purport to carry out duties autonomously have sashayed into vogue within the company world, trusting these techniques to deal with vital enterprise capabilities has change into a sticking level. That’s very true as brokers are built-in into varied office platforms by protocols.
Busse stated many brokers at the moment in use may carry out easy duties like creating IT tickets. However these that may deal with extra difficult processes are nonetheless of their earliest levels of adoption, he stated.
“We’re very, very early,” Busse stated. “When I think of agents, I think of real work…A real work agent does a multistep, complex process that’s trusted. That’s going to take a long time to get there.”
The report additionally discovered that brokers don’t but meet expectations throughout all measures surveyed, which included “improved organizational productivity/efficiency,” “improved customer experience,” and “increased revenue.” Among the many largest roadblocks have been cybersecurity and privateness worries (which 31% of respondents cited), “concerns about data output quality” (23%), and that “business processes [are] not ready for automation” (22%).
As an integration platform itself, Workato has an curiosity in pitching orchestration—the coordination of specialised brokers—as an answer for a few of these enterprise challenges. Standardized protocols that allow brokers talk with each other and with widespread enterprise instruments have been gaining traction.
Workato additionally makes use of brokers internally to do issues like prepping gross sales reps for calls utilizing Salesforce and Gong knowledge, or monitoring and creating plans to fight purchasers’ diminished utilization of the platform, based on Busse.
He stated to anticipate to proceed to see companies adopting brokers in 2026, however widespread use of multi-step advanced brokers could also be “two, three years away.”
This report was initially printed by Tech Brew.
