Large U.S. companies show interest and concern around agentic AI
Almost all large U.S. businesses see value in agentic AI, but many also see associated risk.
A recent survey of more than 250 U.S. IT executives at companies with annual revenue of more than $1 billion from automation platform provider UiPath reveals that 93% of respondents are extremely or very interested in agentic AI, which builds upon the prescriptive capabilities of generative AI to streamline enterprise workflows even further by analyzing massive amounts of data in near-real-time and then automatically taking action based on the results.
"Preparing for the Agentic Era" results indicate that nine-in-10 respondents say they have business processes that would be improved by agentic AI and 37% say they are already using the leading-edge artificial intelligence technology model.
The top perceived benefits of agentic AI cited by respondents include improving oversight of business workflows (58%), increasing integration among applications (53%) and automating complex business workflows (52%).
More than eight-in-10 (84%) respondents indicated that they feel somewhat, very, or extremely pressured to implement next-gen AI tech such as agentic in their organizations.
However, respondents also cited concerns including IT security issues (56%), cost of implementation (37%) and integration with existing systems (35%).
Close to nine-in-10 (87%) respondents said that interoperability between different AI technologies is essential or significantly important to their organizations. But most respondents did not seem to be challenged by this integration.
Almost seven-in-10 (68%) respondents said that it’s extremely (18%), very (31%), or fairly (19%) easy to integrate AI with existing IT infrastructure. All respondents believe that scaling AI is either essential (40%), significantly important (47%), or important (16%) to their organizations.
Among all respondents, when asked what capabilities will be critical to effectively implement agentic AI workflows, the top-ranked item was to "ensure safety and privacy." This was followed in order by "ensure ethical and regulatory compliance" and "seamless integration with existing systems." Respondents were also concerned about upskilling employees with agentic (#4), demonstrating ROI (#5), and getting buy-in from the executive suite (#6).
[READ MORE: IBM: Supply chain execs see competitive edge in agentic, generative AI]
Other findings
- To measure the success of AI implementations, respondents prioritize metrics including process efficiency improvements (67%), cost savings (63%) and ROI (59%).
- Almost all respondents (92%) said it is completely or very likely that their organizations will increase investments in AI or AI-adjacent technologies over the next year.
- IT process automation ranked as the top technology investment in 2025, according to 73%of respondents.