Dan Twing and Tom O'Rourke discuss the evolution from traditional agents to AI-powered agents in enterprise automation software. While automation agents originally served as proxies for remote system operations, AI agents now bring capabilities that enables generative and adaptive responses. Their discussion positions AI agents as an evolution rather than revolution in automation, offering enhanced decision-making capabilities while following similar architectural patterns as traditional agents. Automation leaders should prepare for integration with enterprise systems that have adopted AI agent capabilities, requiring the same coordination, governance and control ofsystems that may have unanticipated behaviors.
Key Points
- Traditional vs. AI Agents: Traditional automation agents operated as delegates for managing remote operations, while AI agents add probabilistic capabilities, LLM intelligence, and generative abilities that enable adaptive decision-making
- Orchestration Evolution: As enterprise software systems adopt AI agent capabilities, automation must evolve to coordinate and orchestrate these intelligent systems while maintaining process integrity.
- Observability: AI-enabled agents can excel at identifying anomalies previously unseen scenarios that may lead to automation service failure
- Integration: Automation teams will need to learn new protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP) to build integrations with AI-enabled systems where vendors do not offer packaged solutions
Takeaways for Automation Leaders
- Anticipate Inevitable Adoption: Even organizations that adopt new technologies slowly will eventually wind up with systems that use AI capabilities
- Start Small: Create a pilot project where AI Agents bring capabilities that aren't available in traditional agents
- Implement Guardrails: Create testing frameworks around AI agents that canidentify where the agent is operating outside expected behaviors
- Build Trust Over Time: Expect that it will take time for staff and users to trust AI, begin using AI agents to provide observations and recommendationsthen gradually increase agent independence to allow autonomous execution
Request for Listeners
If you're starting to integrate AI agents into your automation environment, we would really love to hear from you. We want to hear from some automation team who are using AI agents, so if you're doing interesting things, please reach out to us.
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