Embracing the AI agent revolution: Business orchestration and the path to the autonomous enterprise

November 20, 2024 marks the two-year anniversary of the launch of ChatGPT. AI had been around in many forms, in some cases for decades. Yet on November 20, 2022, everyone from the board room to the back office suddenly had direct access to some of the most sophisticated models yet developed. While many predicted and promised an AI revolution in enterprise software, much of what we've seen in the last two years has been incremental. We've found marginal improvements - summarizing documents, generating code snippets - but haven't fundamentally changed the way we work.

As AI tools slide from the top of the hype cycle into the "trough of disillusionment," we're left wondering: When and where will the promised revolution take hold?

As IT and business leaders, we can do more than just build "faster horses." We now have the opportunity to transform the way we build and use the software that runs our business. This transformation will put intelligence and automation at the center of our architectures, delivering better experiences for our customers and employees, while reducing costs associated with manual work, error-prone systems, and decades of technical debt.

But to achieve this vision, we must embrace three fundamental shifts. All of these are underway in some form or another. Industry watchers like Gartner and Forrester have already started pointing to them. But just as the autonomous vehicle is the product of multiple innovations, only in pulling these three shifts together do we achieve the transformative possibility in front of us.

The first shift is a dramatic acceleration of legacy modernization on the cloud. Many enterprises shifted focus away from modernization as they kept up with pandemic era demands, but now, the push to retire technical debt-ridden legacy systems is accelerating.

Part of this is being driven by the massive consumption commitments enterprises are signing with AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure. IT leaders have committed their future spend to the cloud - and that means shutting down the outdated systems that are an anchor on AI-powered innovation. And a new breed of technology is emerging that is set to dramatically accelerate the re-platforming - and redesign - of these legacy apps.

Forrester calls these app generation platforms. This new approach to software development isn't just coding with some AI pixie dust - it's a new way of building software that combines AI-powered natural language prompts with proven approaches to iteration via visual low-code models, all while baking in testing, DevOps, and other agile best practices.

"Critically, business and industry 'domain knowledge' and 'best practices' will be baked into the AI models supporting this generation process, eliminating the distinction between 'software development' and 'off-the-shelf applications' where business excellence is theoretically predefined."

Some of these app gen platforms will be able to consume documentation, data definitions, and process models from legacy applications - providing a streamlined path to retire legacy applications and move them to the cloud. But this won't just be a re-platforming - it will be a transformational redesign.

The second shift is the move away from automation point solutions to what Gartner is calling business orchestration and automaton technology (BOAT).

After close to a decade of band-aid automation via RP A, enterprises are realizing that to deliver the digital experiences customers, partners, and employees demand, they have to do more than just automate small tasks within an existing process. They need a platform that can orchestrate an entire process from end to end, while applying continuous AI to make the process smarter and more efficient. In other words, after years of filling potholes on outdated roads, enterprises are turning to platforms that support new, digital superhighways - the modern processes that will run their business in the future.

The best approach to BOAT is to adopt a Center-out® business architecture. This is radically different from the traditional approach of building software around user screens or database structures, which is fundamentally ill-suited to a world that expects ubiquitous self-service and agentic automation. Center-out starts with the work being done and the outcomes to be delivered, rather than embedding logic into channels or chatbots, or burying it into back ends.

This orchestration platform is the foundation for our third shift: the move to the "autonomous enterprise" - a business built around the outcomes it delivers, with software designed so automation does the work, supervised by humans, all continuously optimized by AI. In the autonomous enterprise, the business is continuously learning from its own data to make every engagement better and every process more efficient.

Autonomous enterprises use AI agents to drive more automation and faster outcomes for customers. An AI agent is software that can operate intelligently and autonomously to drive a piece of work to completion or where appropriate to dynamically engage a staff member to achieve the optimal outcome. However, with greater intelligence and autonomy, AI agents can also bring increased risk. To truly be effective in the enterprise, AI agents must adhere to the workflows and business rules that ensure compliance, security, and auditability.

Center out is the right architecture for AI agents. Building around outcomes - not screens or database tables - lays out processes and actions that agents can follow, and then continuously optimize with AI. This approach not only allows for automation, it ensures orchestration and governance - with agents following defined best practices in predictable ways - and is always able to pull in a human for assistance.

Pega is at the center of this whirlwind of innovation. Pega GenAI Blueprint™ offers industry-leading proof of the value an app generation platform can deliver, seamlessly injecting proven industry and domain best practices into an application design based not on code, but on visual models that reflect workflows.

Blueprints are seamlessly imported into the Pega Infinity™ platform, which uniquely combines all the elements of Gartner's BOAT architecture - a visual, low-code design environment; rich data integration capabilities; end-to-end process orchestration and case management; and robotics for automating manual tasks. Our Center-out architecture is a proven approach to orchestration and lays the foundation for effective agentic automation - with AI baked in for continuous optimization.

With Blueprint and Pega Infinity, enterprises are armed with an app gen BOAT platform that can rapidly modernize their legacy applications, change the way they build their software, and accelerate the AI revolution.

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