Why am I going back in time to 2011, for AgenticAI, instead of predicting the future in 2025?

Its that time of the year, #predictions for 2025 whats going to transform and change, I have never done these predictions publicly except sporadically in closed circles, this time - wanted to do that with the excitement of AgenticAI and how things have been shaping, it is a clear writing on the wall that this Transformation Wave is going to be 3-4x times the disruption for enterprises compared to the previous ones like cloud, mobile, internet...

Every 20 min, I see a post on my LinkedIn Feed, related to AgenticAI and how that is going to change or something agentic.. and this is the time of the year where there are predictions and future of tech, how it is changing the world etc., as I saw each post, was very tempted to do my own prediction set, instead ended up #lookingbackinTime, and wanted to share the future of enterprises and how they must transform with that time slice as a lens. It only makes sense as you read through the rest of this article in full.

Satya Nadella 's Podcast on AgenticAI

Internet took by storm at least in the AI world, with Satya Nadella 's convo in BG2 Podcast, and the most viewed looks like is the segment of Future of AI Agents @ 28:11 , when Bill Gurley 's question on the operational data, apps and how Microsoft sees this, where Satya goes into how the interop happened with the connectors/adapters, orchestrating different apps in SaaS world, and as these SaaS apps turn more into backend operational systems, and agents take the front seat - there is a need for orchestrating these agents with inter agent interoperability. With this podcast, I have also seen many writing about SaaS is Dead, apps are gone, etc. My views explained below, however fundamentally working a long time transforming enterprises, anything that has been in the blood line of business operations in an enterprise, seeing those systems dead is a distant one, mainframes do still exist in the era of new age petabyte scale transaction systems.

The New World Order - Imperative of Becoming AI powered Enterprise

In my mind, this is classic wave of evolution that is going to happen with the Agents - before SaaS apps there were modules in ERP systems, and saas broke the ERP functions into apps explosion, with agents further breaking down the saas apps into granular "AgenticFunctions" it is going to be a 10x (if not 100x) explosion - any agentic landscape pictures show tons of agents for addressing "point-problems". In fact, given the Agentic Experience is going to be very different than we are currently used to with Systems / apps UX, my take is saas apps become eventually "headless" - therefore 1000% concur with Satya's take on AgenticOrchesration taking the front seat and of paramount importance for all the agents to form a "ReImagined & ReWired" business operations in an enterprise.

Added to this, about a year and half back in Workato 's last #Automate conference (2023), I have done a session on how GenAI (agentic was not in the main stream thinking yet at that time) is going to evolve and what enterprises need to prepare in order to transform - there are 3 key imperatives that I have alluded to, with the way GenAI was heading towards

• Business & IT strategy will become ONE strategy for enterprise business operations - with AI advancements business ops has to be completely reimagined and tech strategy has to embrace rewiring for the new world order
• The rise of Digital Brains , will force Human-DigitalBrain fusion to conduct business operations - needs orchestrating of data, processes, apps, people & Brains(now Agents)
• An enterprise has to ReImagine, ReWire and ReInforce itself towards a #decentralized decisioning mode of operation, meaning - as these brains / agents get to autonomous business decisioning, human workers have a very different role to embrace and play in the world of enterprise business operations

In fact, about 4 years back, I have written a whitepaper on how I was dreaming of the convergence of multiple technologies and their nexus where this new world order is getting formed (I did not foresee or set my prophecies on this world of AI, I was just merely trying to frame a thought process on how Enterprises need to prepare for this NewWorldOrder getting formed - Gartner is framing a new category called #BOAT strikingly similar to what I have put down ) and drafted a #AIMaturityModel for Enterprises - a 6-stage maturity model for enterprises to become #AIPoweredEnterprise (the fun part of this post is that it is generated by Google NotebookLM as podcast style based on the picture of my model that I fed as input to Notebook).

Marc Benioff 's World of Digital Labor

Its fascinating that Marc is trying to lead and disrupt the current Salesforce business to out-innovate itself, with the Digital Labor thought process for the new world order of Agentic. I can completely see this and support this, with again looking back in to the past, starting my career with #entrepreneurship in India, while the IT outsourcing & BPO was just beginning, I have seen and experienced first hand #arbitrage economics, play out. Cost Arbitrage with an explosive combination of 1991 India's new industrial policy, that opened the doors for foreign investments - has completely sported out India to take the front stage of IT in global arena - main reason, arbitrage economics of IT workers in India. If I take the similar parlance of The New world order of Agentic world, similar Arbitrage Economics can be applied to #AIWorkers (aka Digital Labor) and what I call is the #AgenticAI Arbitrage, where it is centrally hinged on productivity gains by augmenting Human Workers with AI Workers. In fact, who none other than Phil Fersht - who has been a visionary & dominating voice on #outsourcing strategy, #labor arbitrage driven economics, and #transformation has a very resounding view which I completely can see through why this is coming out very clearly to be a world driven by #AgenticAI Arbitrage.

Google DeepMind 's Project Astra

The universal assistant of Google's DeepMind, which is contextual, multimodal, multilingual, multimodal reasoning, cross referenced reasoning - is another fascinating thing that is going to have a huge impact on AgenticAI arena. The first generation personal assistants like Siri and other alternates including Wolfram alpha that were based on contextual knowledge, defined intent of the query and response have in a way spearheaded the Agentic world in consumer space with a #people-twin that can help with voice or text based queries. Astra has advanced that by orders of magnitude in multiple dimensions - both in understanding and reasoning. Now think of this, with this level of understanding & reasoning Enterprise Agents can be functioning as a dimension of "business function assistant" to perform the work related functions with extreme efficiency & effectiveness.

12 Days of OpenAI

12 days of OpenAI shipmas was fantastic to see extensive feature announcements on multiple dimensions. In the context of Enterprise Agentic, what caught my eye was Day8 & Day 10 - ChatGPT Search & 1-800-ChatGPT. The example of travel, dining search and booking just like an intelligent personal assistant, abilities of understanding the intent of search / query and providing results / recommendations with both pre-trained learning and reasoning (it is like thinking fast and slow like a human) is a significant milestone to indicate how the enterprise agents can take shape with almost human like working. This puts the digital labor / AI worker arbitrage on high pace.

All this is fine, so what - why does the title refer to AgenticAI & 2011?

In 2008, myself Bhaskar Enaganti and team had a dream too far into the future of Personal assistants - a sort of "world of agents" that would completely do our personal work, business work, family work - the core dream with which we set on a path of venturing was to get these "people twin like assistants" which can help in daily life. Our idea was in the lines of a Diwan (during the pre-independence era in India, there were high elite families who had this designated person who could carry a lot of autonomous tasks and functions on behalf of the head of family or even a state) with a contextual understanding of the situation, person and executing tasks on behalf of the user. We were envisioning these Diwans for different purposes - like personal, family, business, associate groups [nothing but different forms of Agents if described today] - in those days there was no ChatGPT or vector databases or RAG - it was a rudimentary knowledge graph with NER, extensive intent knowledge database and heavy Orchestration of different sources of information that we used to develop this product.

You can see the two videos below and compare how far the tech has evolved in terms of intelligence, understanding, reasoning and responding. OpenAI Day 8 video is in Dec 2024, where as other video was done in 2011.

13 years apart : concept is the same, use case vision is the same, tech that has evolved makes it super exciting.. for me specifically what I have envisioned / dreamt in 2008-2013 time frame is happening now ....

Future Of enterprises: Its obvious and all about transforming with AgenticAI

It is a clear imperative that Enterprises that embrace AgenticAI for their business operations to be rewired, will leapfrog with an extreme competitive advantage. These AI Powered enterprises will be able to out innovate their peers and scale at the speed of AI.

I have the privilege of mind-melding with Vijay Tella on these game-changing ideas of transformation for enterprises, I can see his take on why he started Workato to radically change how enterprises deal with what he calls "The messy middle" that needs to get transformed into "The magic middle", exactly the concept that Satya talks in his podcast why the Orchestration needs to be front & center of AI Powered enterprises. In fact, Vijay talks about these flood of agents while they bring in the brain power, the enterprises need to have a perfectly working nervous system to take business actions - The Magic "Orchestration" in the middle. The New Automation Mindset, a book written by Vijay has a lot of these elements covered in part 3 & part 4

My take on how enterprises can set their path to transform - RRR

As much as a movie buff am, Its definitely not the RRR as in Indian Movie :-) that took west by its mania.

Its a framework that I envision enterprises need to embrace - ReImagine the Business operations with Agents, ReWire the business operations, ReInforce the changed business.

Its not the CIO's job or a tech executive's job to figure out how the AgenticAI can transform the business, it starts with Boards - remember, agentic fuses business & IT strategies. Here is a SCORE-AI framework that I have authored a while back, on how boards can embrace to help transform.

With AgenticAI and the need for reimagining the business operations, there is an imminent need for C-Suite changes needed to get on a path of transformation, CIO needs to get even more stronger connected foundation for this transformation, CxOs bringing their business operations in a cohesive fashion basing on the "connected", "orchestrated", "governed" foundation laid by CIO is very critical. A view of this that I have authored how CxOs need to come together and C-suite changes needed.

The most important element is the execution of a well defined Transformation Strategy. This needs all the "Transformation Executives (every one at every level who are part of the transformation journey)" come together rallying behind what I call AURA (Awareness, Understanding, Reasoning, Actions) transformation architecture. In the world of agents every business operation that is hinged on agents where the agents must have awareness & context of operation, understanding of intent of the operation, reasoning of decisions to be made in the scope of that operation, actions corresponding to that operation - and it is critical every part of business, operations & technology has to be architected around the AURA.

The future of enterprises : 2025 and beyond is exciting & exhilarating with AgenticAI powered business operations. Enterprises transforming themselves into AI Powered Enterprises is fascinating journey to watch and take part in.