"All emerging technology needs to deliver on its promise, sooner or later. For AI agents, that time is now.
The successful deployment of agents -- artificial intelligence that can take actions and make decisions on behalf of people or even themselves -- is vital to the future of model developers such as OpenAI, enterprise software companies like ServiceNow and Salesforce, consumer giants such as Apple, plus AI infrastructure companies including Nvidia, cloud service providers and data center operators.
AI agents are expected to power a new generation of products and capabilities that will drive revenue, through consumer applications such as Apple Intelligence and the transformation of business functions like coding, customer service and supply-chain management.
All that activity should in theory spur demand for more computing power and storage, as well as faster networks, especially as agents become imbued with greater reasoning power, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said this month at the company's GTC developers' conference.
But AI agent adoption is limited so far, according to Tom Coshow, a senior director analyst at researcher Gartner. Just 6% of 3,400 people in a recent Gartner webinar on the subject said their companies had deployed AI agents, according to Coshow.
The survey isn't a formal market analysis, he cautioned. The group's responses may have been tempered by Gartner's guidance that many so-called AI agents are mere assistants.
During the webinar, Gartner shared its definition of agents as AI that makes a decision and takes an action.
Human-resources giant Adecco Group, based in Zurich, has deployed Salesforce's Agentforce service agents to a regional recruitment hub in the U.K. to help fill jobs for its employer clients.
The system recently helped Adecco fill 100% of open positions for one client, up from a more typical 70% with the same employer previously, according to Greg Shewmaker, Adecco group senior vice president for operations and AI. Adecco announced Thursday the launch of a new company, backed by Adecco and Salesforce, that will help organizations build an integrated workforce of humans and AI agents.
Training of these agents, which is often customer-specific, started two months ago, Shewmaker said. They are trained on a combination of structured data such as CVs and job descriptions and unstructured data, including transcripts from recorded conversations and reverse interviews with recruiters, that add previously unavailable context.
Payments giant Visa worked with ServiceNow to create an agent-based dispute resolution system for card-issuing banks, credit unions and other financial technology companies. The result, ServiceNow Disputes Management, mediates situations in which a cardholder contests a charge, such as in an instance of fraud.
The system helps banks and other institutions speed up dispute resolution for their customers, cut operational costs and boost employee productivity, according to Dorit Zilbershot, group vice president of GenAI and AI experiences at ServiceNow. Hundreds of Visa-issuing financial institutions are now using the system, she said.
But most companies exploring AI agents are in the proof-of-concept stage. The 107-year-old National Hockey League is working with data infrastructure company VAST Data to digitize and tag its archive of film and photos, including half a million recorded games.
The idea is to train agents to spot potential stories and insights, such as whether a record is about to be broken, that human broadcasters can use during a game. An agent might let announcers and producers know, for example, that a certain player is on the cusp of becoming the first Canadian in years to score three times in one period, according to the NHL's Dave Lehanski, executive vice president for business development and innovation." [1]
1. Machine Learning's Next Step Is Here. Rosenbush, Steven. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 31 Mar 2025: B4.
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