AI is entering a new phase, moving beyond clever assistants and evolving into systems that actually make decisions and take action. AI agents offer businesses the chance to redefine how they operate – moving from hype to a necessity to achieve business goals. Board executives are driving immense expectations for businesses to adopt these tools to stay ahead. Yet, many are still navigating their own insecurities and fears of how to handle the tools responsibly. Beyond the fear of missing out, many are worried about the possibility of losing control as they try to ride the upcoming agentic wave.
Without the right foundations, skills or tools to keep up with the rapid AI advancements, AI adoption can in fact spring to chaos leading to technical debt and ‘agent sprawl’. The key to unlocking AI value creation is not just the process of innovating, but most importantly establishing control and avoiding chaos. For businesses to truly ride the agentic wave, this requires central control that ultimately allows scalability.
Board pressure to deliver
Businesses are scaling faster than ever and on top of this, LLM developers are introducing new AI models in the market at an ever-growing pace – with these new models comes new strengths. From initiating actions to automating complex workflows, agentic AI is proving to be a top productivity driver and competitive differentiator. As businesses capitalise on ever-more powerful AI models, the expectation for businesses now is not only to implement models but also for those models to deliver results.
Research shows that 74% of CEOs worldwide admit they’ll lose their job within two years if they don’t deliver measurable AI business gains. On top of this, talent is also gravitating towards companies doing groundbreaking AI work. As a result, businesses that fail to embrace agents AI risk losing out to their competitors, which heightens boardroom pressures.
However, addressing the pressure to deliver results quickly is not straight forward, especially when it comes to building agents that address complex business needs.
Why building AI agents presents a challenge
Building AI agents differs from simply creating a chatbot, for example. AI agents are designed to take action, including automating business decisions and powering cross-functional workflows. To ensure that AI agents function properly, it is important that they are built correctly. The way many businesses build agents is by using popular code-based frameworks, such as LlamaIndex or LangChain, to programme how an agent should operate. While these frameworks are effective for developers, the risk is that business users are often excluded from the development process.
AI agents are often implemented into businesses to automate parts of the business process, meaning that the people who are well versed and knowledgeable on business processes, need to be involved in creating the agents.
For agentic AI to succeed within a business, domain experts must be empowered to participate in or lead agent development. Their expertise ensures that the right processes are automated and ensure the AI value creation needed is delivered.
Without experts in the development process, businesses risk bottlenecks and misaligned agents against real business needs.
Losing control to the ‘agent sprawl’
Businesses push forward to deploy AI agents, yet many CEOs remain hesitant. Our latest study shows that 37% of CEOs say their companies have delayed AI initiatives due to fears of potential failure. As AI agents are designed to be autonomous in completing tasks while still maintaining flexibility, this presents a risk. Without clear guardrails and capabilities to monitor an agent’s performance, diagnose issues and then rectify them, this becomes dangerous to the business.
As businesses face pressure to deliver AI results fast and the use of AI agents proliferates across the business, teams often end up experimenting in silos. As a result, IT teams can’t keep up with creations and lose visibility. The growing momentum of agentic AI use in the business slowly gets buried under technical debt and operational risk. What once was a promising use case risks becoming a series of disconnected tools that cannot be governed or controlled.
Without clear guardrails in place to stop ‘agent sprawl’, this could have a reverse impact on business, leaving CEOs exposed to the sentiment that their AI strategies are out of their control.
For this reason, businesses need systems to control and monitor agents, both for the first few agents developed, and also encompassing the scaled level for potentially thousands of agents which might be operating within a business.
Scaling the right wave
The good news is that with the right structures in place, businesses can scale AI agents safely and effectively. To achieve these outcomes, businesses must build with intention. This means moving beyond siloed experiments to applying an architecture and system that can support long term goals.
A crucial factor to help businesses scale is the idea of flexibility and the option to choose between different technologies. With new AI models entering the market and offering specialised capabilities, businesses should be empowered to shift from a single vendor lock-in to embracing the option to operate between multiple models using an LLM Mesh. The flexibility to operate between a range of models within a single agent will drive business value and a competitive edge. Business can also use different LLM models from different vendors to build a range of agents with specific functions. With LLM Mesh, businesses can ride the wave of AI models while preparing for future changes.
From control to creation
Agentic AI is here and it’s moving fast. There is a strong market demand for businesses to deliver high levels of automation and businesses are pressured to have this figured out to avoid underperforming.
While the opportunity is massive, so are the stakes. Business leaders must embrace this shift boldly, but without letting go of control. The wave is coming and businesses that can not only ride that wave but to get ahead of it, are going to be successful in the years to come.
