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Like big Hollywood stars, today’s tech vendors lately are saying, Go talk to my agent.
In the latter half of 2024, companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Google introduced agents—AI assistants that perform specific tasks on a user’s behalf. Some market pros and analysts believe agentic AI will bolster the software market in 2025, in time.
“The agent part of AI still has to be proven. I think we’re going to really see agents coming to maturity maybe in another year or another two years,” Eric Hippeau, managing partner at venture capital company Lerer Hippeau, told CNBC on Nov. 25. “There’s a lot of development around this, but not a lot in practice,” he said.
- Microsoft announced 10 autonomous agents to help customers with tasks like sales team client prioritization and supplier monitoring in October.
- Days after Microsoft’s launch, Salesforce made its Agentforce platform generally available. The company claims the agentic tool will take action to support enterprise scenarios like the resolution of customer cases and the improvement of marketing campaigns.
- On Dec. 11, Alphabet subsidiary Google announced Gemini 2.0, which CEO Sundar Pichai said in a post will “enable us to build new AI agents that bring us closer to our vision of a universal assistant.” (Google also recently introduced a platform “space” for enterprise users to manage multiple agents.)
If copilots are software extensions that help users navigate an app’s features, agents autonomously perform the task. That’s how Pierre DeBois, founder and CEO of analytics firm Zimana defined the term in 2023.
Matt Wood, PwC commercial tech and innovation officer and former AWS VP of AI, sees agents like phone apps, tools that become more capable as they exchange information and employ each other’s capabilities.
“It’s a multiplier because all of these apps can use each to solve harder and harder problems,” Wood told CNBC in December.
Wood said he sees agentic AI especially useful in “regulated workloads” like financial services, healthcare, and insurances—where the regulatory environment has helped support data quality, governance, and access practices required for effective GenAI applications.
The industry index known as iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV), which includes Microsoft, Salesforce, and other software companies, has grown 29% in 2024, “with most of the advance coming since September,” Investor’s Business Daily wrote in December.
Deloitte predicts that in 2025, a quarter of companies currently using generative AI will launch agentic AI pilots or proofs of concept, “growing to 50% in 2027.”
Dave McCarthy, research VP at market intelligence firm IDC, envisions companies going through a testing phase with agents, as they weigh concerns like security, hallucinations, and price, and consider what capabilities are available from free and open source software.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a little bit of a lag between the excitement of what this potential is and then just the time it takes to convince customers to implement it and pay for the licenses,” McCarthy said.