The GenAI & Agentic AI Race is On…
I was on a call with Steve Burkefrom iqbusiness this week, and he was describing how his team is leveraging Agentic AI, RPA, and GenAI to transform the user experience and operational processes for a number of well-known banks. Steve does a great job of breaking things down to a first principle-based view.
- Would customers prefer to be successfully on-boarded in minutes and not days or weeks?
- Would they like a customer service representative to understand their account and their last several interactions as they engage to answer a question?
- Would team members appreciate having mundane, repetitive tasks automated so they can focus on their business and their clients?
The answers to those questions are as undeniable as the technologies that are making intelligent automation a reality. The implications are equally as clear – organizations that successfully leverage GenAI and Agentic AI are going to have a distinct competitive advantage over those that don’t…
GenAI & Agentic AI are Where the Next Decade of Growth will be Decided
Like every previous round of disruptive technology, both GenAI and Agentic AI can be a little “janky” today. GenAI is error prone and can be expensive. Agentic AI is not as “smart” as the platform sales guys would like you to believe. When you evaluate the potential and rate of improvement for both technologies, though, the end game is clear – both will play critical roles in determining which organizations “thrive” in coming years, and which organizations are going to struggle.
GenAI & Agentic AI will Require Significant Capability Journeys
What’s becoming clear is that GenAI & Agentic AI are dependent on a wide range of underlying organizational capabilities. Whether it’s “GenAI-Ready Data”, enterprise orchestration, codified business logic, or programmatic Guardrails – “Winning” with GenAI and Agentic AI is a “team” sport, not an individual event.
Like it or not, adopting new capabilities and evolving existing ones isn’t easy… The analogy of “changing engines while in flight” is so frequently quoted because it’s extremely challenging to do. Business doesn’t stop while you’re retooling for AI success, so you’ll need work “bi-modally” – delivering today’s results, while rearchitecting to leverage AI-enabled capabilities.
Are You Leading or Falling Behind?
Organizations and leaders around the world realize this and are actively working to close readiness gaps and deliver meaningful GenAI & Agentic AI impact. Michael Bueche, CTO @ Farmers Insurance, is a good example. He and his leadership team have carved out an ambitious Vision for Agentic AI, and have already delivered impressive bottom-line impact across the organization.
Many organizations, though, are either taking a “wait and see” approach to adopting GenAI or are “playing small ball” with a bunch of fragmented, “bottoms up” experiments. While this may seem like the “responsible” approach, in fact, it’s analogous to creating “AI Capability Development Debt” that can have serious implications for years to come.
If You Fall Behind, You May Struggle to Ever Catch Up…
Put simply, organizations that proactively address their GenAI-Data Readiness needs, build a deep bench of GenAI & Agentic talent, and systematically close capability gaps are going deliver higher impact operating results than those that don’t. Given that this is generally a multi-year journey, many middle and late adopting organizations will find themselves working to mature their foundational capabilities at exactly the time that early adopters are accelerating their performance. At it’s extreme, that creates a vicious cycle that can be difficult to claw your way out of.
5 Actions to Ensure You’re Ready to Win with GenAI & Agentic AI
1. Make Sure You Understand “The Big Picture”
Start by making sure you understand the range of capabilities needed to successfully adopt and scale GenAI. These range from Productization-specific capabilities, to Secure & Responsible AI, Talent, User Experience, and Enterprise Search, to name a few. It’s a challenging scope, at first, but “if you can’t see it, you can’t scale it” is definitely the case with AI, where a clear mental model is a “Key to Winning”.
2. Get Help Understanding “What Good Will Look Like”
Successful GenAI & Agentic AI adoption “takes a village”… There are just too many areas of technical and non-technical enablers, with broad implications for your journey. You don’t have to work with my firm, Accelerated Innovation, but plan to work with an external organization that specializes in AI adoption to help you understand “What Good Will Look Like” in AI-enabled markets and create a clear Vision for it’s role in your business model.
3. Leverage Targeted Assessments to Understand Your Baseline Readiness
Focus will matter when adopting GenAI. Once you have a clear sense of what target state is likely to look like, prioritize developing a clear understanding of where you’re ready, and where you’re not. Reach out if you’d like to explore Accelerated Innovation’s Keys to Winning GenAI Diagnostic Framework, as we’ve spent 1,000’s of hours building an integrated, progressive assessment framework to help you compress your time to GenAI value.
4. Mobilize Your Organization & Get Moving
Understanding “What Good Looks Like” is one thing – making it a reality for your organization is another… Like exercise, the most important first step is to get moving. Identify GenAI and Agentic AI “Champions” for your organization or group (they may be the same person, but typically aren’t for medium-sized organizations and larger). Then define a clear and compelling Vision, and integrated Strategy, and an Acceleration Plan for your business. Each will require focus, commitment and proper resourcing, but none of them need an army.
5. Prioritize Insights & Rapid Feedback Loops – Speed & Agility will Matter…
While there are a ton of other steps in adopting both GenAI and Agentic AI, prioritize clear measures of success and integrated insights from the beginning. There are a lot of moving parts to scaling these new capabilities, and I guarantee things won’t go exactly as you planned. New innovation will hit, you’ll identify additional capability gaps along the way, and competitors will be actively jockeying for industry leadership too. Make sure you have clear line of sight into where your efforts are moving the needle, where they’re not, and what you need to do about it…
