Companies Adjusting Strategies: Embracing Practical AI to Secure Financial Returns
Federal policy is shifting to allow for more AI development, and one form of AI that is making a significant impact is agentic AI. This type of AI operates as autonomous agents, capable of independent decision-making, real-time adaptation, and multi-step workflow execution.
Current Role of Agentic AI
Agentic AI is currently transforming industries by automating processes such as lead qualification in sales, customer service issue resolution, supply chain management, and financial operations like fraud detection and credit scoring. By handling high-volume, repetitive tasks, human workers are freed to focus on strategic and innovative activities, resulting in measurable ROI through operational cost reductions, accuracy improvements, and significant productivity boosts.
Real-world examples include PayPal’s AI agents managing payments and fraud prevention, and Wolters Kluwer's systems conducting financial forecasting and complex report simplification.
Future Role of Agentic AI
The agentic AI market is projected to grow rapidly, from $7.28 billion in 2025 to $41.32 billion by 2030, achieving an annual growth rate of over 41%. By 2028-2029, agentic AI capabilities are expected to be embedded in one-third of enterprise software applications, with autonomous resolution of up to 80% of common customer issues.
Future agentic AI systems promise continuous learning and better contextual understanding, allowing them to optimize workflows dynamically and make goal-oriented decisions without constant human supervision. This will enhance innovation by freeing resources that are now tied to repetitive tasks and by enabling new data-driven insights through sophisticated autonomous analysis and decision-making.
Key Capabilities of Agentic AI
The key capabilities driving these outcomes include real-time environmental awareness and data-driven adaptability, execution of multi-step, goal-directed workflows, integration with diverse data sources for comprehensive decision insights, and reduction of operational complexity in functions like marketing, finance, support, and inventory management.
The Opportunity Ahead
Agentic AI is revolutionizing business operations by automating complex, data-intensive, repetitive workflows with autonomy and intelligence, significantly improving efficiency, accuracy, and innovation potential both today and in the near future.
However, it's important to note that legacy systems are not built to support dynamic, AI-powered data environments. Ensuring data quality and relevance is key to unlocking real ROI from AI systems. Generative AI will primarily assist humans, not replace them.
The future of business success lies in the combination of human oversight and machine intelligence. Applied AI offers a pathway to turn untapped data into real strategic advantage. The real opportunity isn't in the hype: it's in building AI tools that are grounded, targeted, and designed to solve problems that matter.
Agentic systems give teams the freedom to focus on high-impact work, without sacrificing oversight or precision. Many teams lack the tools to analyze data effectively, and AI can centralize business operations, data management, and reduce the possibility of human error.
In conclusion, AI can unlock underutilized data in businesses, with 64% managing at least one petabyte of data and 41% managing at least 500 petabytes. AI can automate data-heavy tasks such as sales and revenue forecasting, pulling from multiple sources, identifying trends, and generating accurate forecasts with minimal human oversight. AI can flag the signals that matter most, prioritize high-potential leads, and recommend the best next steps. The future of business success lies in the integration of AI, ensuring a balance between ambition and accountability that delivers real, measurable value.
- As technology advances, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in personal-finance sectors is likely to expand, with AI systems capable of tasks like credit scoring and fraud detection, mirroring current uses in businesses like PayPal and Wolters Kluwer.
- The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in business sectors, such as finance, has the potential to create a significant impact on the economy by freeing up human resources for strategic and innovative activities, consequently increasing operational efficiency and productivity.
