How Agentic AI Is Driving Real Business Value

Christine Calhoun:

What benefits are businesses seeing from these, using these AI driven tools, particularly as agentic AI starts to take hold, Jared?

Jared Spataro:

Well, the benefits everybody wants are cost savings and top line revenue generation. I mean, at the end of the day, that's kind of what everyone gets paid to deliver. For the most part, people have been pretty focused on cost savings. They've been trying to find ways to automate work that today requires humans to make that less expensive, more efficient, perhaps even to drive up quality. They've been finding ways to remove whole expense lines from the process. We no longer need to do this. We can do it in a different type of way and we are starting to see real results. We have customers that are automating processes and they're pulling out costs to the tune of tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars. So we're starting to see real results, but that cost savings component really is only half of the story, perhaps the least interesting half of the story. Most people would like to see these agentic technologies help them produce value and generate revenue. They're starting oftentimes with sales. There's a lot of work happening right now to create an autonomous agentic sales type of process where an agent can actually manage sales almost like an inside seller from beginning all the way to transaction at the end without any human intervention. That's pretty exciting. I think that would revolutionize the economics of sales. But even beyond that, how we generate the value itself, research and development, how we deliver that value to customers, all of that is being reimagined right now through agents. And I anticipate over the coming years, that's a place that we'll see a lot of innovation.

Christine Calhoun:

Shishank, what are your thoughts?

Shishank Gupta:

I think Jared said it, I'll just probably instantiate that with a few examples, right? Obviously, first thing is the clients are looking at AI to help solve complex problems, help make decision making easier with different data points that they have and so on and so forth. But yes, I think I already gave two examples of where the, on the business side, on the outcome side, the agents that we're able to work with our clients and deliver value. I spoke about the sales example where the leads to conversion to sales are significantly improved for a client because they started to use agents, they have better insights, the speed of action is much faster, the conversations are much more contextual because it's not the salesperson dependent, but AI is able to really look through us, historic information of the customer and can help convert the lead. I also spoke about how the other client is using the CRM data to really look at customer patterns, look at customer trends in terms of their choices of products and how they moving into one or moving away from the other and help drive greater sales. They're trying to do cross-sell with that information and so on and so forth. There's another one Jared briefly touched upon it for one of our life science clients. We're also working in a context of a research agent, helping them with on the drug side on what can we do? Because remember we're talking about huge volumes of data that have to be looked at and very meticulously looked at. So the agents are really playing a key role in helping drive business outcomes. Obviously on the cost side, there are many examples we can talk about where AI is coming in and helping do self-service and self-heal when it comes to specific operations, whether it's on the IT ops side and so on and so forth. There are also agents that we are seeing where our, for example, on the HR side, a lot of our HR associates for our clients are using agents that we have helped build for them that can help engage their employees better. It provides much greater, richer experience to employees. Employees can interact with these agents in a conversational manner at a time in a manner of their choosing because a lot of our clients are global. Each employee wants to talk to somebody in HR at the time of their choosing. Sometimes it's not possible to have everybody on HR at the same time available. So the agents that we've created helps provide the consistent experience. But again, as Jared said, a lot of them will be a combination of costs and efficiencies on the inside. But the value really has to be a balance of the cost saving on the inside and the value creation and sales and customer delight on the outside. So I do believe there is a play on both sides.