Are AI agents ready to deploy?
While automation holds great potential to transform how work is carried out in future, the near-term reality for businesses is a different story.
The first generation of generative AI assistants and copilots have now descended into what Gartner terms the “trough of disillusionment,” with many projects remaining at a pilot stage due to a combination of factors: change management, a lack of clarity on ROI, and various security considerations, for example. And then there’s the propensity for language models to “hallucinate” answers. Many of the same challenges will be faced when deploying AI agents.
Businesses are understandably cautious about letting LLM-based agents act autonomously and access business systems, for example, even if they are subject to limitations in terms of the actions they are programmed to carry.
For the time being, most businesses will want some sort of human oversight. “There are no circumstances, at least right now, in which you would deploy this without some ‘human in the loop,’” said Kropp. This means that human workers have visibility into the agent’s actions and are consulted before taking riskier actions. That said, Kropp is confident that the problem of AI hallucinations will fade in significance as the technology matures, with agent reasoning capabilities also improving quickly.
While there are likely to be plenty of challenges along the way, Marsh expects that the combination of AI and automation will ultimately have a “profound” impact on how works gets done — even more so than other recent workplace shifts prompted by new technologies.
“I think the productivity gains are there. I think they’re real … If I think of all those changes that have happened over the past five years, this will be easily the biggest,” he said.
