If you have used an AI chatbot, you have experienced firsthand how convenient it is to have an assistant who can answer any questions instantaneously. Now imagine if that assistant could understand and act on your needs without you telling it what to do — meet autonomous agents or agentic AI.
Although this vision may seem like something out of a sci-fi movie, many companies are working on making agentic AI a reality, with enterprise solutions already being released. Deloitte’s 2025 TMT Predictions report predicts that 25% of companies that use generative AI will launch agentic AI pilots by 2025 and 50% by 2027.
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Furthermore, the report suggests investors have contributed over $2bn to agentic AI startups over the last two years, with efforts concentrated in the enterprise market. So, with such rapid growth and robust investments, how much will agents impact workers?
Agentic AI refers to assistants that make decisions independently from human intervention, choosing what actions to take to accomplish a particular goal established by a human. They differ from copilots, which respond to human requests to act.
Because agentic AI performs independently, the technology must be able to perform tasks reliably all the time — and the technology isn’t quite at the required level yet.
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The report says an agentic coding engineer, which would still require some human supervision, will be achievable by 2025. As seen in the chart below, a completely agentic coding engineer is so far away that there is no predicted date:
The report also delineates how the impacts of agentic AI could be “enormous” because there are one billion knowledge workers globally and stagnant productivity growth in the US. Productivity had only increased by 0.5% from 2019 to 2023 compared to 0.8% growth from 1987 to 2023.
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Generic AI must be fully capable to help boost productivity, which the report suggests might not be too far off.
“Most importantly, gen AI agents of all kinds need to be reliable for enterprises to use them: Getting the job right most of the time isn’t enough. There are some use cases and applications in late 2024 that show encouraging signs of being reliable enough for adoption in early 2025,” said the report.
Agentic AI represents a new frontier for AI. However, the technology is built on pre-existing foundations, including large language models, enterprise applications, the internet, and multimodal capabilities.
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Ultimately, the report suggests agentic AI will be valuable despite being at an early stage of development and adoption. The analysis says business leaders should prepare for the rise of AI agents by redesigning workflows and focusing on data governance and cybersecurity while maintaining skepticism.
The report says areas of work that will benefit from agentic AI include customer support, cybersecurity, where there is a significant shortage of skilled knowledge workers, regulatory compliance, and agent builders and orchestrators.
Artificial Intelligence
