Artificial intelligence has long promised to transform the way businesses operate, but only now are we beginning to see its full potential realized. Early waves of AI focused on prediction and content generation, offering useful but limited support. The newest evolution—autonomous agents—goes further by reasoning, sequencing tasks, and taking meaningful action.

In this episode of ATP, Gavin Barfield, CTO and VP of Solution Engineering for ASEAN at Salesforce, explains how this “third wave” of AI is transforming the way businesses operate.

Some of the topics that Gavin covered in detail include:

• The history of AI in business can be broken into waves. We are now entering the autonomous agent era, where AI doesn’t just suggest, but acts.
• The leap from generative to autonomous AI isn’t just about bigger language models—it’s about the rise of reasoning engines.
• Autonomous AI is only as good as the data it uses.
• Far from being merely theoretical, autonomous AI is already proving itself and early use cases are delivering!
• Gavin stressed that AI agents are not about eliminating humans, but about freeing them from low-value tasks and enabling them to do more meaningful ones.
• Gavin posited that CEOs will no longer manage purely human workforces. Instead, they will oversee a hybrid of digital agents and human employees.