That's how it was done in the past until the AI General appeared. Today, human experts are bolstering reports generated by AI.
“Now we can supply all our contacts and public documents to AI, and we can spin out our reports in minutes rather than days with incredible accuracy and detail,” he says. “The expertise of AI Plus humans is a huge boost to quality,” he says.
Now, AI agents have changed the process again. EY releases the agent drive version of the process that evaluates vendors. “This will be ongoing monitoring of vendors, but it was not possible before,” Schuller said.
AI agents are not just optimization use cases, he added. “The real value is the expansion of this market and the expansion of revenue opportunities.”
HR and employee support
Another relatively low-risk, high-value use case for AI agents is answering employee questions and handling simple tasks on their behalf. In fact, in a January IBM survey on Gen AI development, 43% of companies concluded that AI agents were used for HR.
Global data services company Indicium began deploying AI agents in mid-2024, for example, when technology began to mature.
“Both open source and original off-the-shelf applications make it easier to build them,” says Daniel Avansini, the company's CDO.
Agents are used to making things easier in HR, including searching internal knowledge, tagging, tasks like documenting, and other business processes, he says.
Each agent is like a microservice that specializes in something specific. “And they're all talking to each other on a multi-agent system,” he says.
And these quick conversations can be unique. What's tricky is that there are potential hallucinations and all the other issues that come with Gen AI. “So we're going to tweak the model to avoid doing the wrong thing or accessing the wrong information,” he says.
On the positive side, AI agents can handle many questions autonomously and create other business benefits. “And we find something that is not properly documented, which helps to make the process even better,” adds Avanshini.
Business Intelligence
Another area where AI agents have a major impact is business intelligence. While BI dashboards are relatively easy to use, they often extract data team work by gaining insights beyond standard categories, says Ryan Janssen, co-founder and CEO of Zenlytic, a powerful BI vendor for AI.
AI agents combined with BI solutions could potentially allow more employees to access useful analytics, he says. For example, BI AI agents can advise marketing teams on where to spend their budgets based on examples drawn on napkins or create charts, Janssen says.
AI agents who understand voice input can generate business data insights based on spoken language such as “What are the top three marketing channels?”
“That's a very natural question, but it's vague,” Janssen says. “What chatbots and agents can't do is blur that vague question. What does “top” mean?
Many organizations are nearing the start of their agents' AI journey, with hundreds of uses that have yet to be discovered, Janssen adds. Coding agents are an early use case because programming is detail-driven and time-consuming, but now coding enthusiasts use coding assistants to build apps.
“The way they apply most is when you're doing a fierce job, doing a lot of work, or need to pay a lot of attention to the details,” Janssen says.
He adds that when dozens of agents are organized together, companies will see new breakthroughs.
“What agents can do, they haven't yet damaged the surface,” he says. “We don't know what the organization looks like, how they interact, how they will govern. But we're sure we'll understand that over the next few years.”
