AI Agents Can Be the New All-Stars on Your Team

By  Djon Kleine Julien Marx Matthew Kropp Becky Frederick Vladimir Lukic Nicolas de Bellefonds Chris White, and  Scott Porter
Article 5 MIN read

Key Takeaways

These powerful new tools are distinguished by their ability to act—to observe, understand, plan, and do.
  • AI agents’ unlock transformative value far beyond simple automation; they help companies achieve their most important business objectives.
  • Companies need to embrace agents not as standalone tools but as fundamental enablers of efficiency, innovation, and growth.
  • Since agents reshape business processes, onboarding requires addressing both the foundational principles behind processes and the emerging challenges that agents present.
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You might call them the AI all-stars. The latest development in artificial intelligence capability, AI agents move beyond prediction and conversation to actually reshape business processes and get work done. They are distinguished from other forms of AI by their ability to act (under appropriate direction and supervision), executing tasks, achieving goals, and interacting with the real world. AI agents are powerful new tools that can help you achieve your most important business objectives.

AI Talks, Agents Walk

Following hard on the heels of generative, or conversational, AI, which introduced the ability to understand and generate human-like text and images, AI agents represent a far more powerful innovation. Conversational AI understands and responds. AI agents observe, understand, plan, and do. (See Exhibit 1.) Their indispensability is rooted in several key capabilities:

AI Agents Can Be the New All-Stars on Your Team | Exhibit 01

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From Efficiency to Transformative Value

BCG has been working with clients since 2023 to build and implement AI agents. We have developed an open-source agent-building toolkit (AgentKit) used on more than 30 projects. In the course of this work, we have seen agents’ ability to act unlock transformative value far beyond simple automation. Our clients have achieved eye-opening results in these areas:

What all these examples have in common is the use of AI agents able to reshape business processes, integrating previously siloed workflows and removing unnecessary steps regardless of organizational boundaries. Unlocking this transformative power requires a strategic, focused approach based on a company’s overall business objectives. It also means that the 10–20–70 rule —10% of the effort should be focused on algorithms, 20% on technology and data, and the remaining 70% on people and processes—is more relevant than ever. The importance of adhering to responsible AI practices increases as well, since agents will delve into the weeds of risk management and process integrity.

New Capabilities, New Complexities

Process redesign, therefore, lies at the heart of AI agents’ success. Onboarding agents requires addressing both the foundational principles behind processes and the emerging challenges that agents present.

Process Redesign. Automating a broken process will result in a broken outcome. AI agents necessitate rethinking workflows from the ground up, removing unnecessary steps, redefining roles, consolidating tasks, and ensuring that the underlying logic of the process is sound before it is automated.

Codification of Knowledge. AI agents operate on the basis of knowledge, meaning that organizations must explicitly define their version of the best practice for a process. This is particularly important in strategic and creative functions, where workflows are often informal and lack standardization.

System and Data Quality. AI agents derive their power from the ability to access multiple systems, but the effectiveness of their outputs depends entirely on the quality of those systems and the underlying data. The need for quality extends beyond clean, well-structured databases to the predictive models that agents rely on for decision making.

Risk Management and Testing. Unlike a single large or small language model, AI agents operate as multistep chains, often calling on multiple models in sequence or parallel. This capability is a big reason for agents’ power, but it also raises the stakes on responsible AI and significantly increases the complexity of testing, quality assurance, and risk management. Ensuring that the organization has in place robust capabilities for error handling and interpretability, as well as failsafe triggers and the ability to orchestrate and monitor the agents, becomes exponentially more challenging.

Integration. Agents need to be tailored to each company’s needs and circumstances. Still, off-the-shelf AI agent platforms can expedite deployment and reduce initial costs with installed workflow builders. The agents can then be customized for specific processes, objectives, proprietary data, and predictive models. Companies can focus internal development efforts on areas that differentiate their business and offer unique value to customers.

Embracing the Power of Agents

Bringing agents onboard is not about adopting a new technology; it’s about redesigning the business for an AI-driven future. (See Exhibit 2.) Companies need to embrace agents not as standalone tools but as fundamental enablers of efficiency, innovation, and growth. For most organizations, AI agents won’t be a sustainable source of competitive advantage on their own (but in time, they will become table stakes for organizational effectiveness). The true differentiation that agents offer lies the codification of essential processes, the quality of the underlying data, and the seamlessness with which they can be integrated into core processes and ways of working.

AI Agents Can Be the New All-Stars on Your Team | Exhibit 02

Organizations that successfully embed agents into their operational fabric by leveraging proprietary data, refining decision making, and focusing the new capabilities on achieving business objectives will create an enduring advantage that competitors can’t easily replicate.

Authors

Managing Director & Partner

Djon Kleine

Managing Director & Partner
San Francisco - Bay Area

Managing Director & Partner

Julien Marx

Managing Director & Partner
Paris

Managing Director & Senior Partner

Matthew Kropp

Managing Director & Senior Partner
San Francisco - Bay Area

Managing Director & Partner

Becky Frederick

Managing Director & Partner
Seattle

Managing Director & Senior Partner; Global Leader, Tech and Digital Advantage

Vladimir Lukic

Managing Director & Senior Partner; Global Leader, Tech and Digital Advantage
Boston

Managing Director & Senior Partner

Nicolas de Bellefonds

Managing Director & Senior Partner
Paris

Platinion Principal, Cybersecurity

Chris White

Platinion Principal, Cybersecurity
Washington, DC

Project Leader

Scott Porter

Project Leader
Austin

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