Rise of the planet of the Agentic AI

The digital-first economy poses a dual challenge for enterprises - managing an ever-swelling volume of content and efficient orchestration of discreet and complex business workflows. Traditional ECM/DMS systems and WFA platforms, often lack the agility, dynamism, intelligence and autonomy required for digitalisation of modern enterprises. This is exactly where Agentic AI excels – they operate with agility, awareness of context and content, dynamic intelligence and autonomous decision-making capabilities. This convergence of Agentic AI with content and workflow management is neither a trend nor an accident. It is a radical shift in paradigm and transformative.

🤖 What makes Agentic AI different from conventional AI models?

While conventional AI models require explicit prompts, trainings or pre-set triggers, Agentic AI programs are largely autonomous and self-directed agents. They observe, understand, logically reason, plan and act independently within defined boundaries. They are like smart and intelligent digital co-workers that are designed to:

• Comprehend context (not just data)

• Logically decipher

• Learn from outcomes

• Act independently (not just pre-defined triggers), with goal orientation, balancing conflicting priorities to achieve optimal results

• Adapt dynamically to altering inputs

• Collaborate seamlessly with systems, people and even other digital agents and assets

In short, Agentic AI transforms passive automation into intelligent, autonomous orchestration.

🤖 Reinventing Enterprise Content Management

Enterprise content management is no longer just about storage, vanilla search or retrieval. It’s about contextual access, intelligent assessment, dynamic workflow, governance, business recommendations and compliance at scale.

🤖 Agentic AI powered Enterprise Content Management Platforms are:

• Self-organising: Documents and data are auto-tagged, categorised and routed based on contextual and semantic understanding and continuous learning.

• Compliance-aware: AI agents monitor content lifecycles, flag process and policy breaches, initiate corrective workflows, archieving, rerouting or redaction tasks autonomously.

• Smart retrieval: Users are able to seek, locate and retrieve relevant documents and insights – not just search results – based on the role, intent, context and historical usage.

For example, a contract management agentic component can independently classify uploaded contracts, extract critical dates, monitor compliance clauses and alert legal teams on identified anomalies, proactively, with zero human intervention.

🤖 Workflow Automation Reimagined

Traditional workflow engines operate on static rules while business realities are is constantly evolving and unpredictable.

With Agentic AI, workflow automation becomes:

• Goal-driven: Agents align actions with business objectives, not focused on completion of assigned tasks.

• Adaptive: If a process workflow hits an exception, the agent can re-route, ask clarifying questions, or escalate autonomously.

• Seamlessly Orchestrated: From document ingestion, to adaptive workflows, to decision-making to stakeholder notification – agents or correlated group of agentic components can seamlessly own the end-to-end set of business processes.

Thus, manual interventions are significantly reduced, responsiveness become agile, resolution times get faster, greater process resilience is established and modifications and integrations get easier.

🤖 Typical Use Cases

• Insurance: Claims management agents can validate documents, assess damage, trigger approvals and handle customer queries over a single, seamless loop.

• HR Onboarding: Intelligent sourcing, screening, dynamic document collection, validation and setup workflows can be personalised based on each new hire’s skills, experience, location, role, compensation, ROI goal, etc.

• Compliance Management: AI agents can scan content repositories to ensure GDPR, HIPAA, IBR, CMMI or ISO compliance – and proactively identify and remediate issues.

• Healthcare: Agentic AI can manage appointment scheduling, patient care coordination and even authorisation workflows – significantly reducing healthcare administrative burden, improving patient and treatment outcomes, establishing stronger ROIs.

• Finance: Agentic AI may be leveraged to automate document analysis, risk assessments, compliance monitoring, streamlining approval processes, in triggering mitigation workflows and in effective reduction of risks.

🤖 The Business Value of Agentic AI

Agentic AI is about unlocking new levels of business value:

• Scalable intelligence: AI agents make systems capable of handling complex, multi-step business workflow processes at scale.

• Continuous optimization: AI Agents learn from every interaction, iteration and process cycle, improving their accuracy and influence over time.

• Human-like reasoning without fatigue: Agents can make nuanced decisions, adapt to exceptions, and collaborate with both people and systems, cycles after cycles, continuously and tirelessly without getting plagued by the natural human phenomenon of fatigue due overwork and monotony.

🤖 However, is it all hunky-dory with Agentic AI?

While Agentic AI promises significant benefits and promises to be the definite road for the future enterprise solutions, enterprises must address 5 key challenges:

1. Data security and compliance: AI agents must be architected and trained to operate within strict governance frameworks to protect sensitive data.

2. Transparency and explainability: AI decisions will have to be transparent, auditable and periodically aligned with business objectives.

3. Human oversight: Complex workflows and decisions must have a clear escalation path to humans or corrective processes.

4. Bias and fairness: Periodic audits of Agentic AI empowered systems are essential to prevent unintended or accidental discrimination.

5. Business alignment: AI agents must be designed to work toward enterprise goals, ensuring relevance and accuracy. Review, re-engineering and course correction is essential to derive long-term, sustainable benefits.

Interestingly, in spite of the enormous benefits predicted by technology leaders and innovators, Gartner says that over 40% of Agentic AI projects may be canceled by the end of 2027 due to escalating costs, unclear business value and/or inadequate risk management. Many of the current implementations lack the inherent maturity to achieve complex business goals autonomously or diligently follow nuanced instructions over time. Gartner has recommended use of Agentic AI with a clear understanding of the underlying value or ROI and has suggested rethinking workflows from the ground up for successful implementation.

Despite these challenges, the rapidly emerging trend is pretty clear. Gartner predicts that at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through Agentic AI by 2028, up from 0% in 2024. Additionally, 33% of enterprise software applications will include Agentic AI by 2028, up from less than 1% in 2024. What does this information mean for your business or for your technology products or services?

With the rise of hybrid workforces, data sprawl, continuous emergence of new technology stacks, change in business priorities, emergence of newer skills, margin and compliance pressures, enterprises can no longer rely on rigid, monolithic, human-driven automation alone. Yet, it’s certainly not about replacing humans – rather it’s about augmenting human capabilities and enabling organizations to focus on strategic initiatives.

No doubt that the future is agentic. The fusion of Agentic AI with ECM and workflow platforms is a giant leap toward autonomous, truly agile, compliant and super-efficient enterprise operations. Organizations that embrace it early will unlock not just efficiency, but unbridled scale, agility and foresight. As we move towards a future where AI doesn’t just answer – but acts. Agentic AI is set to be the nerve center of enterprise digital transformation.

Are you exploring Agentic AI in your organization? Share your experiences and insights in the comments below! If you are eager to understand how Somnetics could help you adopt and leverage Agentic AI for your products or services (if you are technology company), or modernize your enterprise IT strategy (if you are a business), get in touch with us at vaskar.bhattacharya@somnetics.in

References & Credits: Gartner, StoryLab, AI21, Persistent, Coveo Industry insights from TechTarget, Automation Anywhere, Moveworks, and SuperAGI