AI Solution Providers Prepare For The Agent Era

“It was a bit of an epiphany for him,” Grant Davies, principal of digital strategy at Perficient, said about showing a customer how AI agents talk to each other.

Grant Davies, principal of digital strategy at Perficient, told CRN in an interview that customers can hardly believe it when he demonstrates artificial intelligence agents “talking to each other”–that is, one agent generates content and one or more agents help improve the content.

“It was a bit of an epiphany for him,” Davies recalled of one customer seeing the demo. “A bit of a mind blow.”

Perficient–based in St. Louis and No. 56 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500– is among the camp of solution providers ready to bring customers into the agentic phase of generative AI while exploring ways to leverage the technology internally to improve operations.

[RELATED: The 10 Biggest AI News Stories Of 2024: Nvidia, GenAI And Security]

AI Agents In The Channel

Executives with AI leaders such as Microsoft, Google and Salesforce have already started talking about this next part of the AI journey–which is already having an influence on enterprise technology by some measures. Salesforce reported in December that AI and agents influenced $60 billion in sales during the 2024 Cyber Week shopping season.

Deloitte said in a November report that a quarter of companies using GenAI will launch agentic AI pilots or proofs of concept (PoCs) in 2025, with the share reaching 50 percent in 2027.

Gartner in October said that 15 percent of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI by 2028, with 33 percent of enterprise software applications including agentic AI.

Partners Explore Agentic AI

Carlos Marques, technology director at Tallahassee, Fla.-based Mainline Information Systems–a member of CRN’s The 2024 MSP 500–told CRN his company is looking at AI agents–a more autonomous version of GenAI that completes directed tasks–as a way to lower the cost of delivery for managed services, increase productivity without needing to hire more people and to take over repetitive mundane tasks from employees.

The technology is still early, however, Marques said. Integration work can take months and some customers aren’t ready to trust AI agents with sensitive information.

“Everybody understands the potential,” Marques said. “But there’s also going to be a fight of, is it more or less risky to let the agent do privileged things?”

Amas Tenumah, global leader of service transformation and AI innovation at Seattle-based Slalom–No. 27 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500–told CRN in an interview that he likens agents to an intern given tasks to complete by the user.

The solution provider has dozens of agents in production, in industries ranging from health care to retail. Use cases have included customer service, even issuing customers credit after an issue, Tenumah said. Agents have also shown better ability at upselling customers, proving more persuasive than human counterparts on occasion.

Agents hold the promise of a interface for subject matter experts (SMEs) with no coding experience to now execute complicated tasks once reserved for programmers.

“People who have humanities degrees, this is your time now to shine,” he said. “You will be the next developers who are going to be making the big bucks. Even my kids, (I tell them) don’t bother coding anymore.”

Mike Strohl, CEO of Concord, Calif.-based e360–No. 128 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500–told CRN in an interview that he is seeing success leveraging agents with human resources (HR) use cases, such as allowing workers to search for company policies.

Where solution providers remain key to introducing AI agents and any new technology to the world is translating that technology to the industries and customer problems partners are more intimately familiar with compared to vendors, Strohl said.

“You really have to be able to speak the language of the client, which means you have to understand their business–their applications, their people, their data, their customers, their outcomes–if you’re going to provide value from an AI standpoint,” Strohl said. “Otherwise you’re not going to get very far.”

Corey Kirkendoll, CEO of Plano, Texas-based 5K Technical Services–a member of CRN’s 2024 Managed Service Provider 500–told CRN in an interview that he has leveraged agents for employees seeking policies around time off and procedures plus speeding up the hiring process by pre-qualifying candidates for technology specialist jobs.

AI copilots are still an important part of the AI adoption journey, with customers needing to master the more general AI use cases before adding in autonomous AI agents to perform a more complicated task, he said.

In the future, Kirkendoll hopes to use agents to create marketing material, onboard new 5K employees and for some self-help customer service.

“We’re learning how to capitalize on taking that human time, going down, and leverage agents to do as much as possible,” he said.

Perficient Embraces AI Agents

Eric Walk, principal for enterprise data strategy at St. Louis-based Perficient, told CRN in an interview that the solution provider is leveraging agents for use cases such as orders status checks. The agents interpret the context of a user’s request and which application programming interfaces (APIs) to call to perform the task.

Within Perficient, AI agents are writing the first draft of user stories for consultants to leverage, and others are using paired programming AI to code. Agents are writing the first draft of request for proposal (RFP) responses and automating the production of case studies after project completions, Walk said.

AI copilots will continue on for more general use cases, Walk said. Customers adopting AI copilots will still look to solution providers for change management and achieving more value from the technology. Agentic frameworks take humans out of the process more so compared to copilots.

He said he hopes that AI vendors don’t over promise on what agents can deliver out of the box and that they remember the importance of cross-platform integrations and interactions for enterprises with a hodgepodge of vendors and data sources. But complicated technology is where the channel thrives.

“The No. 1 challenge to this is adoption and ROI realization,” Walk said. “They’re cool tech, but they’ve got to do something meaningful.”

Perficient’s Davies said that agentic AI still has to cut down on the level of incorrect answers and hallucinations to become production ready, but he expects improvements in the future. For now, he sees an important part of success in keeping customers’ agent expectations realistic. The agents aren’t cure-alls, but the savings they help find even in incremental use are appetizing to customers.

“If you can use individual agents or agentic frameworks to pull an hour out of somebody’s day, and you do that three times a week or five times a week, and you do it for 50 people, that’s real money,” he said.

Originally Appeared Here