Some more tales from the road. Met with a couple dozen technology leaders this week across banking, media, information services, insurance, and consulting to discuss agents in the enterprise.
Some of the biggest trends right now:
* Cyber! Everyone nervous about the growing rate of vulnerabilities coming at them from AI, and the implications of the OpenAI Hugging Face incident. The conversation is not as existential as it is in Silicon Valley, but still highly concerned and pragmatic about what to do about it operationally in their environments. Lots of new discoveries due to AI, and still hard to keep up with all the changes they have to execute now.
* Model battles persist. Most companies are deploying multiple frontier models within their enterprise. Too hard to standardize on anything and seeing different preferences across their teams and use cases. But the dollars are still concentrated on just a few vendors. Open weights still in infancy at scale in most of these organizations, often due to lack of domestic “frontier” OSS options. Plenty of appetite for more options here, but so far few places to go.
* Agent security and identity. Somewhat tied to Hugging Face, there’s much more awareness to the new challenges around agent security and identity management in a world when agents are trying to get into every system they can. In a perfect world enterprises could setup identities for all their agents and control what they’re doing, but of course sometimes the agent needs to act exactly as the user as well.
* Process reengineering. Most companies realizing that the big upside of agents is when they can change the actual workflow itself to get the full gains from AI. Far more ROI when companies can adjust their workflows to support agents changing how the work happens instead of just layering on agents into the existing flow. But the big question is who can actually tackle driving these changes, where does that live, etc. Best lessons were still around embedded FDEs in the functions.
* Ruthless adjusting of architectures. Most companies had examples of changing systems out multiple times just in the past year or two with different vendors. I probably haven’t heard “we tried X and it didn’t work so have gone with Y” more than in today’s environment. The lesson here is that because innovation is happening so fast, no one hangs around until a vendor gets something right, they just move on to the next one.
* Evals! Still very early for most companies to have a good grasp of evals of their workflows. A few customers out of a couple dozen called this out - huge opportunity right now for enterprises to have a good sense of how their work actually happens and how well AI is doing against it.
* Legacy systems still a hurdle. As always, legacy systems still remain a mainstay issue that holds back enterprises from rapid adoption of AI in enterprises. Data is fragmented across legacy environments that weren’t built for an agentic world. Companies spending a lot of time just cleaning up these old platforms.
Many more topics, but these tend to be some of the more top of mind items at the moment in the enterprise.
Excited to partner more deeply with OpenAI so you can work with your enterprise content from Box securely in ChatGPT.
Software continues to go headless, and we’re massive believers that the future of work will be AI agents that can process data and execute workflows anywhere. https://t.co/CNZv5CH8bn