CIOs: 3 actions to boost the impact of your agentic AI

We’re now facing a paradox when it comes to AI. New AI tools, such as copilots, assistants and agents, are flooding the market with the promise of saving time and money for organizations, but the reality inside organizations is different. While 97% of C-suite leaders expect AI tools to increase their productivity levels, 77% of employees report these tools have only added to their workload¹. Instead of ease and simplicity, these tools are creating complex processes that bog down teams with more work. Meanwhile, business leaders are expected to change almost every business process while generating returns with AI.

AI has rapidly evolved from traditional machine learning outputs to generative AI (gen AI) assistants, copilots and chatbots that enhance productivity within existing systems. Now, the next frontier of productivity for business is AI agents—autonomous, outcome-driven systems that can execute complex tasks and create entirely new levels of efficiency and value creation. Driving this transformation with intentionality is a must as AI-first enterprises will be the ones that succeed and see the true benefits of this technology. For CIOs, this transformation means steering the ship, identifying the right AI for the right job and using AI agents strategically as they continue to evolve from being a technology initiative to an opportunity to the entire business.  

Explore the following 3 critical challenges CIOs are facing on their journey into breaking the productivity paradox and how they can overcome them.

“How do we set our people up for the future? We feel it’s by giving them the confidence to use AI in different situations as part of their own development.”³

Tamara Vrooman 
CEO 
Vancouver Airport Authority  

Empowering an entire organization to benefit from AI isn’t just about adopting AI, it’s about thoughtfully applying it to pain points and growth opportunities across an organization.  

A Deloitte survey reported that 26% of organizations are exploring autonomous agent development⁴. AI agents shaping industries and workflows, but with their proliferation comes a growing number of AI vendors, agent sprawl and multiplying digital complexity.  

Despite the optimism around AI and autonomous agents, leaders express doubt in their ability to scale within an organization. In the Deloitte survey, more than 2/3 of respondents said 30% or fewer of their investments will scale in the next 3 to 6 months⁵. This increased use of AI throughout an organization without a clear vision for the communication and orchestration across the business sets the stage for productivity shortfalls—not the promise of AI that leaders expect. This paradox emphasizes how important it is for business leaders to identify the right AI for the right process and find key high-value workflows to apply the right blend of AI for an AI-first organizational transformation.   

“Your AI roadmap should be the company’s strategy fueled by AI, data, process, people and culture."⁶

Shobhit Varshney
VP and Senior Partner, Americas AI Leader, IBM Consulting.

At this juncture, it’s up to the CIO to determine how AI will help the business and turn instances of quick wins into organizational transformation.  
 
Here are some questions to ask when determining how to steer uses of AI—AI agents, assistants and automation—into achieving your business goals:

1. Where will AI deliver the greatest business value? 
Apply AI to use cases tied to growth, efficiency or risk reduction—not just what’s technically possible.
2. Is our data ecosystem ready to support scalable AI? Assess your data quality, accessibility, governance and lineage to ensure AI agents operate on trustworthy inputs. If data is siloed, prioritize removing those silos.
3. Can our people and processes absorb this change?
 Invest in change management, employee upskilling and workflow redesign to drive adoption and long-term impact.
4. Do our platforms support secure, scalable AI integration?
 Evaluate architecture, APIs and automation readiness to ensure AI agents can be embedded without disruption.
   

“The future of work is not about humans versus machines; it’s about humans and machines working together. AI often shines a light on what’s not working within an organization.”

Ann Funai, CIO and VP of Business Platforms Transformation at IBM

For example, Avid Solutions, a food production research and development firm, used AI and automation to optimize the new customer onboarding process by 25% and reduced the number of project management process errors by 10%. By focusing on critical business processes that were time-consuming and error-prone, they identified an ideal opportunity for optimization. Their team now spends less time on manual tasks, focusing more on strategic work.⁷

Invest in and focus on where AI can have the most impact.

“None of us truly appreciated how fast this was going to move, and how often the capabilities around AI would change. We have to continuously evaluate how AI goes into an environment and the potential impact it will have.”

Matt Lyteson, CIO, Technology Platform Transformation at IBM

The average company is now using 254 AI-enabled apps—including apps not sanctioned by the business⁸.  Executives are acknowledging the sprawl and attempting to control it, as 84% of CIOs say there are too many AI tools⁹.  Remember, the true power of AI in your organization is not correlated to the number of tools, but to how integrated your applications, tools and processes are across the business. Instead of adding more AI tools, focus on creating an orchestration layer across the business that connects people, processes, workflows, data, tools and applications that are already in place—including effective instances of automation, conversational AI and traditional AI. A unified, coordinated ecosystem will unlock a whole new level of what’s possible.

While the terms AI assistants and AI agents are often used interchangeably, AI assistants typically handle repetitive, well-defined tasks, whereas AI agents operate with greater autonomy—using reasoning to pursue outcomes with minimal human intervention. Here are 6 questions to help you decide where to get started with AI agents or AI assistants.

• Which repetitive, well-defined or low value tasks are your employees spending time on?
• Which decision-making processes follow predictable rules or patterns and could be improved or made faster with data-driven insights?
• Are there workflows that span multiple systems or departments and suffer from handoff delays or manual coordination?
• What high-impact goals could be accelerated if a system could act independently within defined guardrails?
• Are there areas where customer service or employee satisfaction is lagging due to slow response times or inconsistency?
• Do you have access to the data needed to support AI agents in this area—and is it trustworthy?

If you’re wondering where to start, know that client support and customer service, human resources, digital procurement, and IT modernization have all had a track record of producing quantifiable productivity gains using AI agents and assistants. For example, IBM’s AskHR has automated 80 different HR processes and 94% of simple tasks, such as vacation requests and pay statements. And across these various use cases IBM has realized USD 3.5 billion in cost savings.¹⁰

Fill in the gaps in how AI connects with your workflows, humans and other tools.

“Culturally it’s important to set a tone. It's about encouraging people to take chances and telling them it is a strategic priority for the company to be more nimble and more agile than anybody else we compete with.”¹¹

Tom Hogan
CEO, Cellebrite

Whether with workflows, people, automation, other technology tools or applications, AI is most impactful when connected.

Even though AI integration is a crucial step in harnessing the power of AI, only 40% of CIOs feel fully prepared to manage and integrate AI technology into their existing business.¹² AI agents and assistant currently operate in silos, which can be a barrier to moving from a fragmented adoption of AI to systematic and holistic adoption.

For years, interacting with AI assistants and tools required navigating complex systems, but that issue is being resolved with integrated AI agents. Not only do these agents interact with each other, but they interact seamlessly with automation tools as they are woven across your core business. For example, the IBM watsonx Orchestrate™ solution acts as an agentic AI manager, routing agents, connecting them with automation and even sequencing multiple agents together to complete complex tasks.  

As AI becomes more integral in your business, barriers to using AI agents and assistants drop significantly, creating an environment where people with little or no tech skills can build AI agents for individual workflows, and organizations must prepare.

It’s important to make sure your employees have the right training and support not just to use AI, but to use it to drive maximum impact. Advocate for AI tools that are human- centric and make that determination with metrics that aren’t solely based on business outcomes.

First, understand whether your AI tools are delivering on ease of use and freeing up your team from repetitive tasks.

• Calculate the percentage of AI users in your organization.
• Track the frequency of AI use in daily work.
• Assign a human-machine friction score to task where AI is used.

After identifying the right AI to integrate into employees’ workflows, the next step is determining whether your organization is ready for widespread use of AI. Ask the following questions to understand how ready you are for organizational transformation.

• Have you established responsible AI principles for your enterprise? If not, setting guardrails is crucial as the number of AI users multiply. Define responsible AI practices, educate and raise awareness, integrate ethics across the AI development lifecycle and keep humans in the loop in every step.
• Which percentage of employees are trained on AI fundamentals? According to an IBM Institute for Business Value study, CEOs said 31% of their workforce will require retraining and reskilling over the next 3 years and 54% said they’re hiring for AI roles that didn’t exist a year ago.¹³ Start with reimagining processes and identifying bottlenecks, and use these insights to see where you can augment with talent or upskill your team with free AI fundamentals training.
• Are your CXOs participating in AI councils or task forces? Discuss with your CXO how AI is changing how we work, not just making tasks get done faster. An AI council can help align AI use with enterprise strategy, establish policies, facilitate knowledge sharing and more. AI initiatives can quickly become fragmented and ineffective without strategic coordination.
• Have your business processes been redesigned to take advantage of AI capabilities? When you enhance and reimagine your processes before you automate or add AI agents, you’ll be on a path that will boost productivity more than you initially expected and generate more value.
  

As you prepare for your ambitions as a CIO in an AI-first future, remember the following can help you break the productivity paradox and achieve higher returns on AI.

• Identify the weaknesses or bottlenecks in your organization that can be solved with AI agents or assistants.
• Be disciplined in where you adopt AI; resist the AI fear of missing out (FOMO).
• Integrate your AI with your diverse ecosystems.
• Connect your AI to your existing data, applications, tools and employees.