Humans and AI bots working together towards business goals
As 2025 begins, AI Agents and Assistants (hereafter referred to as ‘AI Agents’) are becoming indispensable, with enterprises worldwide deploying them to enhance operations and customer engagement. Per the 2024 State of AI Report by McKinsey, companies are seeing meaningful revenue increases (more than 5%) by using GenAI in supply chain and inventory management functions. AI Agents are likely to push those gains even further.
Reimagining AI Agents in Workspace
So, how should companies think about AI Agents? Are they just like other software tools in the company, merely tools for humans to achieve their business goals? Or should they think of AI Agents as complementary team members, available 24×7 and never get tired?
Forward-thinking companies that recognize AI’s potential to revolutionize their operations need to view AI Agents as a strategic asset and workforce multipliers, especially in customer-facing roles. For example, a banking company modernized its legacy mainframe platform with AI Agents resulting in 40% acceleration in time to migrate and 40% cost reductions.
Real World Impact of AI Agents
Organizations across industries are already reaping the rewards of deploying AI Agents in customer service, marketing, and other customer-facing roles. For instance, one of our retail clients that deployed AI chatbot was able to complete 80% of all interactions without human intervention while improving Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) by 20%. This resulted in annual operational cost savings of $20 million.
Strategic Best Practices for AI Agents
To maximize the benefits of AI Agents, companies should approach their implementation strategically. Based on our experience, here are six best practices:
- Have a clearly defined goal: Set SMART goals (specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and timely) for AI Agents. This clarity helps align the agents’ performance with business objectives, like how you manage human teams.
- Establish a Strategic Oversight Group: Assemble key stakeholders to define policies, set guardrails for responsible AI deployment, and ensure data protection and ethical AI use.
- Rethink your existing processes: This is an appropriate time to revisit your existing processes to see how to streamline them and how AI Agents can eliminate or reduce needs for human interactions. For example, before deploying a refund & returns AI agent for an e-commerce client, they conducted an analysis of their refunds and found that 40% of the returns were of low value while their operational cost to process them was same regardless of the amount of the return requested. So, they set a threshold and AI agent automatically refunded the amount below that amount, thereby reducing the returns volume that humans had to manage.
- Measure progress towards goals: Just like human workforce is periodically reviewed for progress towards goals, so too, the AI agents should be measured against stated goals. This should be focused not just on completion metrics but also measure the quality of interactions.
- Take corrective action: AI Agents can make mistakes or need additional training just like humans do to be successful. So, identify and correct mistakes as quickly as possible. Train the AI agents in both the right way and wrong way to do the task. After corrective actions, if the AI Agents are still not making progress towards goals, do not be afraid to fire them. While sunk costs could be a hindrance to firing these agents, consider the potential for lost revenue, reputation, and customer satisfaction if the low-performing AI Agents fail to make progress. Also, keep in mind that your customers might take longer to adapt to the change, which could result in slower progress to the goals.
- Rinse and repeat: Gather lessons learned from both your successful and unsuccessful AI initiatives. Share these lessons widely across the organization and adjust policies, guardrails, and internal processes as appropriate.
The future is hybrid – Humans and AI Agents
To succeed in a hybrid workforce era, leaders must strategically align AI Agents with business goals, optimizing both human and AI contributions. Those who act now will harness the full transformative potential of AI Agents. The shift towards a hybrid workforce will begin this year. Forward thinking businesses that view AI Agents as integral to their business will be able to truly harness the transformative potential.