This was the year of AI agents. Chatbots that simply answered questions are now evolving into autonomous agents that can carry out tasks on a userโs behalf, so enterprises continue to invest in agentic platforms as transformation evolves. Software vendors are investing in it as fast as they can, too.
According to a National Research Group survey of more than 3,000 senior leaders, more than half of executives say their organization is already using AI agents. Of the companies that spend no less than half their AI budget on AI agents, 88% say theyโre already seeing ROI on at least one use case, with top areas being customer service and experience, marketing, cybersecurity, and software development.
On the software provider side, Gartner predicts 40% of enterprise software applications in 2026 will include agentic AI, up from less than 5% today. And agentic AI could drive approximately 30% of enterprise application software revenue by 2035, surpassing $450 billion, up from 2% in 2025. In fact, business users might not have to interact directly with the business applications at all since AI agent ecosystems will carry out user instructions across multiple applications and business functions. At that point, a third of user experiences will shift from native applications to agentic front ends, Gartner predicts.
Itโs already starting. Most enterprise applications will have embedded assistants, a precursor to agentic AI, by the end of this year, adds Gartner.
IDC has similar predictions. By 2028, 45% of IT product and service interactions will use agents as the primary interface, the firm says. Thatโll change not just how companies work, but how CIOs work as well.
Agents as employees
At financial services provider OneDigital, chief product officer Vinay Gidwaney is already working with AI agents, almost as if they were people.
โWe decided to call them AI coworkers, and we set up an AI staffing team co-owned between my technology team and our chief people officer and her HR team,โ he says. โThat team is responsible for hiring AI coworkers and bringing them into the organization.โ You heard that right: โhiring.โ
The first step is to sit down with the business leader and write a job description, which is fed to the AI agent, and then it becomes known as an intern.
โWe have a lot of interns weโre testing at the company,โ says Gidwaney. โIf they pass, they get promoted to apprentices and we give them our best practices, guardrails, a personality, and human supervisors responsible for training them, auditing what they do, and writing improvement plans.โ
The next promotion is to a full-time coworker, and it becomes available to be used by anyone at the company.
โAnyone at our company can go on the corporate intranet, read the skill sets, and get ice breakers if they donโt know how to start,โ he says. โYou can pick a coworker off the shelf and start chatting with them.โ
For example, thereโs Ben, a benefits expert whoโs trained on everything having to do with employee benefits.
โWe have our employee benefits consultants sitting with clients every day,โ Gidwaney says. โBen will take all the information and help the consultants strategize how to lower costs, and how to negotiate with carriers. Heโs the consultantsโ thought partner.โ
There are similar AI coworkers working on retirement planning, and on property and casualty as well. These were built in-house because theyโre core to the companyโs business. But there are also external AI agents who can provide additional functionality in specialized yet less core areas, like legal or marketing content creation. In software development, OneDigital uses third-party AI agents as coding assistants.
When choosing whether to sign up for these agents, Gidwaney says he doesnโt think of it the way he thinks about licensing software, but more to hiring a human consultant or contractor. For example, will the agent be a good cultural fit?
But in some cases, itโs worse than hiring humans since a bad human hire who turns out to be toxic will only interact with a small number of other employees. But an AI agent might interact with thousands of them.
โYou have to apply the same level of scrutiny as how you hire real humans,โ he says.
A vendor who looks like a technology company might also, in effect, be a staffing firm. โThey look and feel like humans, and you have to treat them like that,โ he adds.
Another way that AI agents are similar to human consultants is when they leave the company, they take their expertise with them, including what they gained along the way. Data can be downloaded, Gidwaney says, but not necessarily the fine-tuning or other improvements the agent received. Realistically, there might not be any practical way to extract that from a third-party agent, and that could lead to AI vendor lock-in.
Edward Tull, VP of technology and operations at JBGoodwin Realtors, says he, too, sees AI agents as something akin to people. โI see it more as a teammate,โ he says. โAs we implement more across departments, I can see these teammates talking to each other. It becomes almost like a person.โ
Today, JBGoodwin uses two main platforms for its AI agents. Zapier lets the company build its own and HubSpot has its own AaaS, and theyโre already pre-built. โThere are lead enrichment agents and workflow agents,โ says Tull.
And the company is open to using more. โIn accounting, if someone builds an agent to work with this particular type of accounting software, we might hire that agent,โ he says. โOr a marketing coordinator that we could hire thatโs built and ready to go and connected to systems we already use.โ
With agents, his job is becoming less about technology and more about management, he adds. โItโs less day-to-day building and more governance, and trying to position the company to be competitive in the world of AI,โ he says.
Heโs not the only one thinking of AI agents as more akin to human workers than to software.
โWith agents, because the technology is evolving so far, itโs almost like youโre hiring employees,โ says Sheldon Monteiro, chief product officer at Publicis Sapient. โYou have to determine whom to hire, how to train them, make sure all the business units are getting value out of them, and figure when to fire them. Itโs a continuous process, and this is very different from the past, where I make a commitment to a platform and stick with it because the solution works for the business.โ
This changes how the technology solutions are managed, he adds. What companies will need now is a CHRO, but for agentic employees.
Managing outcomes, not persons
Vituity is one of the largest national, privately-held medical groups, with 600 hospitals, 13,800 employees, and nearly 14 million patients. The company is building its own AI agents, but is also using off-the-shelf ones, as AaaS. And AI agents arenโt people, says CIO Amith Nair. โThe agent has no feelings,โ he says. โAGI isnโt here yet.โ
Instead, it all comes down to outcomes, he says. โIf you define an outcome for a task, thatโs the outcome youโre holding that agent to.โ And that part isnโt different to holding employees accountable to an outcome. โBut you donโt need to manage the agent,โ he adds. โTheyโre not people.โ
Instead, the agent is orchestrated and you can plug and play them. โIt needs to understand our business model and our business context, so you ground the agent to get the job done,โ he says.
For mission-critical functions, especially ones related to sensitive healthcare data, Vituity is building its own agents inside a HIPAA-certified LLM environment using the Workato agent development platform and the Microsoft agentic platform.
For other functions, especially ones having to do with public data, Vituity uses off-the-shelf agents, such as ones from Salesforce and Snowflake. The company is also using Claude with GitHub Copilot for coding. Nair can already see that agentic systems will change the way enterprise software works.
โMost of the enterprise applications should get up to speed with MCP, the integration layer for standardization,โ he says. โIf they donโt get to it, itโs going to become a challenge for them to keep selling their product.โ
A company needs to be able to access its own data via an MCP connector, he says. โAI needs data, and if they donโt give you an MCP, you just start moving it all to a data warehouse,โ he adds.
Sharp learning curve
In addition to providing a way to store and organize your data, enterprise software vendors also offer logic and functionality, and AI will soon be able to handle that as well.
โAll you need is a good workflow engine where you can develop new business processes on the fly, so it can orchestrate with other agents,โ Nair says. โI donโt think weโre too far away, but weโre not there yet. Until then, SaaS vendors are still relevant. The question is, can they charge that much money anymore.โ
The costs of SaaS will eventually have to come down to the cost of inference, storage, and other infrastructure, but they canโt survive the way theyโre charging now he says. So SaaS vendors are building agents to augment or replace their current interfaces. But that approach itself has its limits. Say, for example, instead of using Salesforceโs agent, a company can use its own agents to interact with the Salesforce environment.
โItโs already happening,โ Nair adds. โMy SOC agent is pulling in all the log files from Salesforce. Theyโre not providing me anything other than the security layer they need to protect the data that exists there.โ
AI agents are set to change the dynamic between enterprises and software vendors in other ways, too. One major difference between software and agents is software is well-defined, operates in a particular way, and changes slowly, says Jinsook Han, chief of strategy, corporate development, and global agentic AI at Genpact.
โBut we expect when the agent comes in, itโs going to get smarter every day,โ she says. โThe world will change dramatically because agents are continuously changing. And the expectations from the enterprises are also being reshaped.โ
Another difference is agents can more easily work with data and systems where they are. Take for example a sales agent meeting with customers, says Anand Rao, AI professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Each salesperson has a calendar where all their meetings are scheduled, and they have emails, messages, and meeting recordings. An agent can simply access those emails when needed.
โWhy put them all into Salesforce?โ Rao asks. โIf the idea is to do and monitor the sale, it doesnโt have to go into Salesforce, and the agents can go grab it.โ
When Rao was a consultant having a conversation with a client, heโd log it into Salesforce with a note, for instance, saying the client needs a white paper from the partner in charge of quantum.
With an agent taking notes during the meeting, it can immediately identify the action items and follow up to get the white paper.
โRight now weโre blindly automating the existing workflow,โ Rao says. โBut why do we need to do that? Thereโll be a fundamental shift of how we see value chains and systems. Weโll get rid of all the intermediate steps. Thatโs the biggest worry for the SAPs, Salesforces, and Workdays of the world.โ
Another aspect of the agentic economy is instead of a human employee talking to a vendorโs AI agent, a company agent can handle the conversation on the employeeโs behalf. And if a company wants to switch vendors, the experience will be seamless for employees, since they never had to deal directly with the vendor anyway.
โI think thatโs something thatโll happen,โ says Ricardo Baeza-Yates, co-chair of theย US technology policy committee at the Association for Computing Machinery. โAnd it makes the market more competitive, and makes integrating things much easier.โ
In the short term, however, it might make more sense for companies to use the vendorsโ agents instead of creating their own.
โI recommend people donโt overbuild because everything is moving,โ says Bret Greenstein, CAIO at West Monroe Partners, a management consulting firm. โIf you build a highly complicated system, youโre going to be building yourself some tech debt. If an agent exists in your application and itโs localized to the data in that application, use it.โ
But over time, an agent thatโs independent of the application can be more effective, he says, and thereโs a lot of lock-in that goes into applications. โItโs going to be easier every day to build the agent you want without having to buy a giant license. โThe effort to get effective agents is dropping rapidly, and the justification for getting expensive agents from your enterprise software vendors is getting less,โ he says.
The future of software
According to IDC, pure seat-based pricing will be obsolete by 2028, forcing 70% of vendors to figure out new business models.
With technology evolving as quickly as it is, JBGoodwin Realtors has already started to change its approach to buying tech, says Tull. It used to prefer long-term contracts, for example but thatโs not the case anymore โYou save more if you go longer, but Iโll ask for an option to re-sign with a cap,โ he says.
That doesnโt mean SaaS will die overnight. Companies have made significant investments in their current technology infrastructure, says Patrycja Sobera, SVP of digital workplace solutions at Unisys.
โTheyโre not scrapping their strategies around cloud and SaaS,โ she says. โTheyโre not saying, โLetโs abandon this and go straight to agentic.โ Iโm not seeing that at all.โ
Ultimately, people are slow to change, and institutions are even slower. Many organizations are still running legacy systems. For example, the FAA has just come out with a bold plan to update its systems by getting rid of floppy disks and upgrading from Windows 95. They expect this to take four years.
But the center of gravity will move toward agents and, as it does, so will funding, innovation, green-field deployments, and the economics of the software industry.
โThere are so many organizations and leaders who need to cross the chasm,โ says Sobera. โYouโre going to have organizations at different levels of maturity, and some will be stuck in SaaS mentality, but feeling more in control while some of our progressive clients will embrace the move. Weโre also seeing those clients outperform their peers in revenue, innovation, and satisfaction.โ
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