Scaling Agentic AI is a business transformation – not just a tech project
The speed of AI adoption will be set by organisations’ speed of change. Businesses with the most organisational flexibility and readiness to adapt will be positioned to realise the most value.
The pace of AI innovation can be overwhelming with constant new game changing capabilities being released by the hyperscalers and frontier models like low-cost training techniques or Agentic AI. AI agents are the most talked-about advancement of late as these autonomous agents can complete complex tasks and meet objectives with little or no human supervision.
This was on show at the recent Agentforce World Tour event in Sydney, hosted by Salesforce. There were countless demonstrations including complex customer interactions managed by Agents switching between voice, text and image to support sales and customer service. The event was attended by over 8000 people, showing the strong interest in Agentic AI.
Take up of Agentic AI has been staggering, with around a quarter of businesses trialling it within the first three months, according to a recent survey conducted by Deloitte. About 42 per cent of respondents believed multi-agent systems are the technology that will “drive the future”. The report also finds 50 per cent of companies will launch Agentic AI agent pilots by 2027.
But regardless of how fast the technology progresses, the speed of adoption will be set by organisations’ speed of change. That means businesses with the most organisational flexibility and readiness to adapt will be positioned to realise the most value.
So what can businesses be doing now to put themselves at the front of the pack to achieve scale?
Here are our three key takeaways from the Agentforce World Tour event.
The first is trust and that includes regulatory compliance, security and privacy.
Building a robust plan for Trustworthy AI addresses safe and responsible use while enabling broad access so innovation and adoption can thrive.
A plan for trust focuses on managing risk and compliance so that your AI doesn’t have unintended impacts. However, a well-designed plan can also unlock delivery speed through efficient decision making, approved AI tooling and usage guardrails.
Businesses need to have a plan for regulatory compliance, monitoring, security and controls to allow them to progress while regulatory uncertainty remains in Australia.
This is front of mind for Australian business leaders.
In our recent State of GenAI in the Enterprise report, regulatory compliance came out as the top challenge for 42 per cent of those surveyed, surpassing concerns about technical talent and skills.
But most leaders are not moving quickly enough or taking sufficient action. Deloitte’s AI at a crossroads report released in December found more than 90 per cent of organisations can improve their AI governance.
It also found many leaders don’t realise the extent of what needs to be done. Around a quarter of C-suite executives and tech leaders surveyed say they are “highly prepared” to manage AI risks, but a deeper look shows only 9 per cent have a “ready” level of governance.
While prioritising AI governance practices can be challenging amidst competing priorities, it’s a vital step on the path to capitalising on the opportunities AI brings.
The second thing businesses need to be thinking about is technology choices and data.
GenAI technology choices are quickly becoming more complex. Consideration needs to be given to model choices, where and how these are trained and monitored, while also ensuring the right data is available and regulatory compliance is achieved where applicable. Naturally, these choices will have flow-on impacts, so having a way to evaluate them is also important.
Considering the rapid pace of advancement in the technology, organisations should focus on flexibility and open architectures. This will help enable changes in direction or accommodation of new technology without incurring high cost or rework. It can also help organisations avoid getting locked into software choices or cost models that are unfavourable in the future. Developing a set of principles to guide choices and understanding impacts is key to a sustainable path to scale value with GenAI.
The third thing and potentially the most important for businesses to act upon is organisational readiness.
Our State of GenAI survey found that while tech is changing rapidly, the speed of adoption is moving at the pace of organisations – not the speed of technology.
Therefore, it’s vital for organisations to have the processes and stakeholder buy-in to make the most of rapidly evolving tech like Agentic AI to drive what should be considered as a transformation, not a technology project.
AI agents will effectively be digital workers assigned to complete tasks or groups of tasks so adoption needs to be thought of as a business transformation across the enterprise.
The scale of transformation and the value to be gained are deeply connected to the choices we’ve discussed so far. A simple example here is risk appetite – where a low risk appetite on AI agents will reduce scale of deployment and therefore value. These things can’t be seen as independent.
2025 is going to be action-packed for AI, in particular Agentic AI, but, if you want to build competitive advantage and progress faster than others – our research and experience continues to show you need more than just experiments – you need to be aware of the combined impact of barriers in your organisation – and develop a plan that considers these together to unlock value potential and path to scale.
Stu Scotis is National Leader for Generative AI at Deloitte Australia.
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