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One of the buzzwords of 2024 in AI has been agents, specifically the agentic future. AI agents have become one of the most talked-about trends for enterprises, and as more organizations look to implement agents, the future for agents may look rosy.
In the next year, more enterprises could bring AI agents out of sandboxes and into production, making AI agents a big trend for 2025.
Steve Lucas, CEO of platform integration company Boomi, said the conversation around AI agents picked up speed this year due to multiple factors in the growth trajectory of generative AI and models.
“I believe there are moments in time in the course of history where there’s convergence, and things come together to create an outcome we didn’t expect so soon,” Lucas said in an interview with VentureBeat. “You have near infinite compute, extraordinarily powerful GPU processing capabilities, data that is not near infinite, sprinkle in a fundamentally new way to take and process inputs and outputs that have all converged at the same time.”
In other words, AI agents became a big deal because we can see a path for these agents to actually work.
When organizations and AI companies talk about an agentic future, they usually mean a time when many tasks within an enterprise are automated. People will either prompt, or do a simple action, and AI agents will begin fulfilling those requests.
In the past few months, large service providers have begun offering access to agents to customers. Salesforce has gone all in on agents with the release of agents called Agentforce. Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said during the launch of Agentforce that AI agents represent the “third wave of AI” which the company is very excited about helping to usher in.
It isn’t just Salesforce that is talking up AI agents. Slack will let customers integrate agents from Salesforce, Asana, Workday, Cohere, Writer and Adobe. ServiceNow updated its Now Assist platform with a library of ready-to-use agents, and AWS introduced Agents for Bedrock so clients can build custom agents more quickly.
Lucas and other experts VentureBeat spoke to agreed that 2024 is the year enterprises realize they can bring agents into their technology stack. The following year will bring more agent deployment, but multiple agents working together could still take some time to work well.
The momentum is not slowing down
The various platforms available to access a library of agents or low-code ways to build custom agents make it easier for enterprises to consider using agents. The adoption of agents is already growing. A survey from Forum Ventures showed that among 100 senior IT leaders, it spoke to, 48% are ready to bring AI agents into operations. Around 33% said they are very prepared.
As they continue experimenting and figuring out good use cases for their organizations, 2025 will allow companies to test out production in small tasks for agents.
Deloitte Head of AI Jim Rowan said clients who’ve started limited tests of agents see the potential of agents “as skilled collaborators that enterprises have been searching for that understands personal preferences.”
Boomi’s Lucas said his company is anticipating the number of customers using its agents “should go up 10x next year.” He said around 2,000 clients actively use Boomi’s agents.
However, while 2025 could see a boom in agents, some enterprises may also consider the cost of using agents widely. Paul van der Boor, vice president for AI at investment company Prosus, told VentureBeat that agentic use will only keep growing, but companies have to remember there is a cost inherent to this technology.
“The trajectory is not going change because I think the direction is clear,” van der Boor said. “Keep in mind that there’s also a lot of practical considerations because one of the things agents do is they require multiple calls to various elements, and they require more tokens, so they’re more expensive.”
AI agents will see evolution, too
Lucas said the best use of agents is when they move from solitary actors to digital employees working with each other and human workers to complete tasks. But we won’t see multi-agents in production early in 2025. Lucas said what is most likely is the rise of agent islands.
“You’ll have islands, like the Salesforce island, the Boomi island, the Oracle island. Over time, these agents will talk to each other,” he said.
The next few years could see the rise of agents taking more of a proactive role in the enterprise.
Deloitte’s Rowan said some AI agents could become multipurpose agents that anticipate users’ needs. For example, the agent could proactively scan someone’s inbox, categorize inbound emails from clients, reference those with a list of priorities, tailor responses and flag any information to the employee.
“Over time, agents will level up on the cognitive nature of the task they’re performing. I don’t think we’re there yet because agents now are still operating more at the behest of the employee,” he said.
One future AI agent evolution could be a conductor or orchestration agent. Meta agents, one of the many terms for this concept, is an AI agent that directs traffic or actions of other agents.
Paul Tether, CEO of market intelligence firm Amplyfi, said the so-called Meta Agents is the ultimate next step for enterprise AI agents.
“By the end of next year, we’ll start to see meta agents emerge,” he predicted.