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In recent years, the introduction of AI has increased the power and impact of enterprise automation, enabling us to strive for ever-greater efficiency and productivity. At the same time, the processes these automations are empowering have also grown in complexity. Investment has poured into siloed enterprise systems, with the average large company now using over 175 enterprise applications across their workflows.
Data has become more siloed and processes more fragmented. Many decisions within a workflow aren’t clear-cut, requiring people to step in — all of which adds to the operational burden. Finally, the complexity of these processes means they cannot cohesively be monitored, optimized, or fully automated.
A new era for automation — agentic automation — provides a path forward. Combining agents, robots, AI, and people, agentic automation can automate even the longest, most complex processes end-to-end. Working effortlessly across disparate systems, it will deliver transformational outcomes across the enterprise, making businesses more autonomous and productive while enhancing the experiences of customers and employees.
What does the agentic future look like?
Businesses have known and benefitted from robotic process automation (RPA) for years. Robots perform work tasks by interacting with screens, systems, and data like people do. They are rules-based, act predictably, and make deterministic decisions. This makes them highly reliable and efficient for routine tasks that don’t need adaptability or decision-making skills — like entering data, processing transactions, or triggering responses.
AI agents are a much newer, emerging technology. Agents are AI-model-based, enabling them to work independently of people and improve over time. There are many different types of agents, but they are generally goal-oriented and able to use context to make proactive and probabilistic decisions. This makes them complementary to robots and ideal for complex processes that require high adaptability.
While flexible and powerful, agents can’t handle an entire process all by themselves. Agents need humans to monitor their performance, approve, and improve their work. But agents also need robots to complete many of the individual, routine tasks that make up long-running enterprise processes. Just like any employee, every agent has a toolbox of tools and capabilities they need to do their job. Alongside API connectors and intelligent document processing, automations will continue to play a significant role in the enterprise technology ecosystem.
To automate long, complex, and dynamic enterprise processes, agents and robots need to work together. A useful analogy is the left and right parts of the brain working together. In the emerging autonomous enterprise, important and logical left-brain tasks, like data gathering, entry, and migration, will be done by robots. Creative and dynamic right-brain tasks — forecasting, comparison, innovation, and problem-solving — will be performed by agents. People will supervise this work. This combination of capabilities makes agents and robots a powerful match, poised to automate the majority of all work.
New survey reveals agentic investment underway
To better understand how leaders are preparing for the agentic era, UiPath recently surveyed more than 250 U.S. IT executives at companies with revenue over $1 billion. It also held qualitative interviews with senior technology leaders regarding their awareness of and interest in agentic AI. The report found that 37% of respondents say they already use agentic AI, and 93% are either extremely or very interested in exploring it. In addition, 90% of respondents believe that they have processes that would be improved by agentic AI.
While most IT leaders have seen value from their automation and AI deployments to date, they have also experienced challenges – namely, security, development complexity, integration, and data quality.
When asked which benefits of agentic AI would be most appealing to their businesses, respondents cited improved oversight of business workflows (58%), increased integration among applications (53%), and the automation of complex business workflows (52%). According to the report, the top limitation with existing AI tools is lack of integration with other business applications, with 87% stating that interoperability between different AI technologies is essential or significant to their organizations.
Agents are core to agentic automation. But enterprises don’t just need autonomous agents who can do things—they need enterprise agents they can trust to do them safely, accurately, and reliably. In other words, business leaders and people leaders don’t just want agents, they want agents they can trust.
In fact, respondents identified IT security issues (56%) and integration with existing systems (35%) as their top concerns with agentic AI, along with cost of implementation (37%). When asked what capabilities would be most critical to the effective implementation of agentic AI workflows, the top-ranked response was “safety and privacy,” followed by “seamless integration with existing systems.” Executives see business value from agentic technology that can operate autonomously, so long as it is governed, secure, and trustworthy, the report found.
People working alongside AI agents
How will this impact the workforce? Agentic technology means people will have more time for high-value work. Agents are increasingly taking on the majority of work, while people continue and expand their roles as supervisors, decision makers, and leaders. According to a recent survey by Atlassian, executives estimate that only 24% of their employees are doing mission-critical work.
Even with agents taking on more work, people will remain firmly in control. People will use agents and robots as tools to supercharge their productivity, creating new agentic workflows as needed. Humans in the loop will be crucial for exception management, with employees stepping in to solve problems that agents and robots can’t. People’s judgment, compassion, and responsibility can’t be replicated. That’s why people are the leaders, supervisors, and ultimate decision-makers of agentic automation.
Very soon, companies will begin introducing training courses for employees to learn how agents work, understand their critical importance in supervising agents’ recommendations, and upskill their abilities to manage workflows that increasingly include AI companions.
Agentic automation is more than just trusted enterprise agents. It’s about transformative, end-to-end outcomes. That requires effective collaboration between all the components that comprise enterprise workflows and total visibility into how they’re working together. However, that isn’t always easy due to process complexity and limited visibility into those processes.
Agentic automation needs an orchestration layer to seamlessly orchestrate end-to-end processes across humans, systems, robots, and AI agents. This requires a gamut of capabilities like process management, process intelligence, automation, and agentic AI. Agents also need to be a key ingredient in the process management lifecycle, with tools to design, orchestrate, and monitor agentic workflows across systems.
Agents expand the automation potential of all organizations by placing focus not just on individualized tasks, but entire end-to-end processes. By harnessing the collective power of agents, robots, and people, businesses can accelerate to a future where employees can conquer more rewarding work. People will adapt to new agentic environments, much as they have with prior evolutions in emerging technology and AI. So, while agentic AI is redefining what automation can achieve, it is only going to be successful with humans as collaborators to solve complex challenges.
