AIM has been extensively discussing AI agents for a while now. From investors to tech founders predicting the big wave of AI agents, it was evident that every major company would bet big on them.
When AIM had the chance to be a part of Oracle CloudWorld 2024 in Las Vegas and Dreamforce 2024 in San Francisco, our journalists observed a common theme across both enterprise events: no surprise, it was agents.
At the Oracle CloudWorld event, the multi cloud partnership between Oracle and big tech cloud giants, (the recent being AWS), took the limelight. However, Oracle’s focus and push towards agentic and autonomous systems couldn’t have been clearer.
The big tech announced over 50+ AI agents within its Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, to automate a number of tasks that will help streamline business processes, deliver personalised insights, and boost productivity across various functions including finance, supply chain, HR, and sales, among other tasks.
Steve Miranda at Oracle CloudWorld Keynote. Source: Youtube Oracle
What’s in a Name?
When every major enterprise and Saas player is betting high on agents, the question on defining agents cannot be evaded. Every organisation, majorly in the last year, had been terming their version of AI support as AI ‘assistants’ or ‘copilots’ that had been designed to do activities on specific sets of instructions. However, the functionality of these new agents border on a semi to fully autonomous capabilities.
Steve Miranda, executive vice president, applications development at Oracle told AIM, “I think that early use cases will be a little bit less completely autonomous and more human assisted.”
However, referring to the future roadmap, Miranda mentioned how Oracle will move to a future where an agent to agent transaction with full autonomy will happen. He believes that ‘agent workflows’ is the direction in which they are headed.
Big Tech is Behind Agents
Oracle might have been the first to announce such levels of agent integrations on the platform, but the others quickly followed with their suite of agentic products.
At Salesforce’ biggest tech summit, Dreamforce 2024, the company unveiled Agentforce Partner Network that brings together tech giants such as AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, and Workday to enhance the AI-powered Agentforce platform’s capabilities. Over 100+ industry-specific prompts for Agentforce were announced.
The new agentic system allows companies to deploy AI agents to perform varied tasks not just across Salesforce but also third-party platforms. Marc Benioff, the CEO, has been clear on how this could change the way businesses work and claimed how ‘AI agents means no DIY for clients.’
Marc Benioff keynote speech during Dreamforce 2024. Source: Youtube Salesforce
Salesforce didn’t stop at that. The Saas giant announced their collaboration with NVIDIA to develop advanced AI capabilities for enterprises using autonomous agents. This partnership will integrate NVIDIA’s AI platform with Salesforce’s Agentforce, creating an ecosystem that aims to deploy billions of Agentforce agents in the coming years.
Interestingly, the global market for autonomous AI and AI agents is projected to reach $28.5 billion by 2028. Riding this wave is another big tech company, which also made significant announcements about its autonomous AI capabilities.
Microsoft, went a step further on their already existing AI assistant Copilot suite. The company recently introduced Copilot agents in its Microsoft 365 Copilot platform designed to help businesses customise AI for their specific needs. Microsoft’s Copilot agents link to data sources like SharePoint and Dynamics 365, automating tasks and integrating with existing systems to streamline workflows.
Microsoft’s strong aide OpenAI is also working on their bit on their agentic journey which Sam Altman considers to be the third stage of AI. The ChatGPT-maker announced their multi-year partnership with mobile operator T-Mobile to create AI agents for their customer service platform called IntentCX. The new platform will utilise OpenAI’s APIs and its latest o1 model.
Oracle, Salesforce, and other enterprises going big on agents are approaching it from a vertical integration point of view. Focusing on industry-specific functions, the agents are employed to accomplish tasks such as summarisation and emails for each domain. However, OpenAI’s progress on the agentic front will likely operate on a horizontal level, as evident from the improved reasoning capabilities of the models the company is releasing.
Automatic agentic workflows may be one thing, but at the same time, enterprises are also headed towards fully functional autonomous capabilities across functions.
“By 2025, we will have moved all of our applications to the autonomous database. We will be off the older databases. Everything must be autonomous. Not to save money, but to keep the data safer,” said Oracle’s chief Larry Ellison, in his keynote speech at the Oracle event.
Ellison in fact believes that autonomous systems would be the way to address cybersecurity issues. He spoke about how Oracle is using AI to create autonomous systems, or “cyber defence robots,” to protect against identity theft, unauthorised access, and data theft, including the resale of stolen credit card information. AI is actively being employed to prevent such incidents. “We are using AI to prevent that from happening,” he said.
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