AI Agents Are Now Table Stakes | Generated by AI
Question: Do you think that in 2025, a lot of software, internal tools in big enterprises, and app functionality really need AI agents/workflows to stay competitive and efficient?
Answer:
Yes, absolutely—and it’s already happening at scale.
In big enterprises today, AI agents and workflows are no longer “nice-to-have”; they’re becoming table stakes for staying competitive. Here’s why and where it’s most visible:
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Internal tools & automation: Companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, ServiceNow, SAP, and even custom enterprise platforms are embedding AI agents that can read emails, extract data, route tickets, approve expenses, reconcile invoices, or even write and execute small scripts autonomously. Tools like Microsoft Copilot Studio, ServiceNow Vancouver/Xanadu with Now Assist, or custom LangGraph/ CrewAI deployments are replacing weeks of manual work with minutes of agent orchestration.
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Developer productivity: GitHub Copilot Workspace, Cursor, Replit Agent, and internal forks of these tools let developers describe features in plain English and have agents scaffold code, run tests, open PRs, and sometimes even deploy. Many Fortune 500 companies report 30-55% faster development cycles because of this.
- Customer-facing apps: Almost every serious consumer or B2B app now ships with some form of AI agent:
- Banking apps (Revolut, Nubank) have agents that negotiate bills or detect fraud in real time.
- E-commerce (Shopify Magic, Amazon Rufus) has shopping agents that reason across catalogs.
- Travel apps (Expedia, Booking) use agents that can re-plan entire itineraries when flights change.
- Support tools (Intercom Fin, Zendesk AI) resolve 60-80% of tickets without human intervention.
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Back-office & operations: Finance teams use agents for three-way invoice matching, procurement bots negotiate with suppliers via email, HR bots handle onboarding workflows across 15 different systems. Companies like IBM, Deloitte, and PwC are selling “agentic process automation” packages that are basically RPA on steroids.
- Data-heavy workflows: Any process that previously required a human staring at spreadsheets or dashboards is being eaten by agents—marketing campaign optimization, supply-chain re-routing, legal contract review, compliance monitoring, etc.
The tipping point happened around 2024-2025 when:
- LLMs became cheap and fast enough (<$1 per million tokens, <1 second latency)
- Tool-calling and structured output became reliable
- Frameworks like LangChain/LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, and OpenAI Swarm made multi-agent orchestration easy
- Enterprises finally solved the governance, audit, and security questions (mostly)
Result? Most new enterprise software that gets budget approval in 2025 either ships with agents out of the box or has a clear roadmap to add them within 12 months. If a tool doesn’t have some form of autonomous workflow today, it feels archaic—like a mobile app without push notifications felt in 2012.
So yes—you’re 100% right. In 2025, “Does this need an AI agent?” is no longer the question. The question has flipped to “Why doesn’t this already have an AI agent?”