By Rajeev Singh, Executive Managing Director, Applications and Business Process Services at NTT DATA
Enterprises are undergoing a quiet revolution currently, moving away from investing in every new emerging technology and instead adopting a much more disciplined outcome-driven mindset. Organisations today are prioritising technologies basis how they measurably improve operational efficiency, strengthen resilience and speed up time-to-market. Impact and value creation for businesses are steadily becoming the foremost criteria for investment decisions for today’s enterprises, representing a fundamental shift in how they evaluate and execute digital transformation.
This shift towards value-first technology investments marks a defining change in enterprise strategy, where success is measured by outcomes, rather than just adoption. At the core of this is agentic AI, which stands out as a critical enabler of this transition. It helps organisations move from experimentation to execution by embedding measurable impact into everyday operations.
Agentic AI: Buzzword to Business Value
Agentic AI is emerging as one of the clearest examples of value-centred investments. Unlike traditional AI which only generate outputs based on prompts, agentic AI are autonomous systems that understand overarching goals, interact with other systems and execute tasks with minimal intervention from humans, thereby driving real value.
Intelligent agents can now:
Design and manage workflows autonomously, eliminating manual bottlenecks
Learn from outcomes to refine processes over time
Integrate with cloud platforms and enterprise systems to scale across functions.
As per a Gartner report, by 2026, 40% of enterprise applications will include integrated task-specific AI agents, with the capacity to operate and perform complex end-to-end tasks. The report also estimates that by 2028, AI agent ecosystems will enable a network of specialised agents to dynamically collaborate across multiple applications and business functions.
The shift towards AI agent ecosystem is said to transform enterprise applications from tools supporting individual productivity into platforms enabling seamless autonomous collaboration and dynamic workflow orchestration.
Having said that, unlocking value requires a structured and outcome-driven approach to identify and test high-impact use cases for agentic AI. Using a three-pronged approach, enterprises first uncover where agentic AI can drive the most value for their business by mapping out and prioritising relevant use cases.
This is followed by an in-depth analysis of prioritised opportunities, evaluating technical and data readiness, mapping processes and developing detailed solution designs supported by refined business cases and ROI models. Finally, enterprises rapidly prototype and pilot agentic AI solutions, define success metrics, validate impact through user testing and build a scalable roadmap for organisation-wide adoption.
Modernisation & Strategic Partnerships Drive Measurable Impact
Enterprises today are linking agentic AI adoption to broader modernisation efforts, integrating legacy systems, improving scalability and anchoring new systems in secure resilient infrastructures. This change is being driven by strategic cloud partnerships, wherein organisations are collaborating to improve customer service and optimise logistics, allowing enterprises to move away from experimentation to end-to-end realisation.
These trends underscore how tech investments today are increasingly judged on value unlocked, rather than tools used. Enterprises are bundling cloud platforms, AI capabilities and industry-specific solutions into frameworks that enable rapid deployment, scaling and quantifiable gains.
Measuring Value
In this value-driven landscape, traditional metrics like uptime and project completion rates are no longer sufficient. Today’s leaders are prioritising values that tie directly to metrics, which quantify enterprise performance. Monitoring metrics like cycle time reduction across processes, resilience scores, revenue per digital channel and net promoter scores, makes technology investments accountable and transparent.
According to the Agentic AI Services for Hyperscaler Technologies report, enterprises have seen 50 – 65% reduction in the manual tickets handled by humans and 100% orders automated with AI agents. This directly translates to reduced operational overheads and faster delivery of business services.
The shift will eventually filter out technologies that do not contribute measurable value, while elevating those that do. For leaders, it also brings a more balanced approach, allowing organisations to pursue innovation while maintaining accountability.
Agentic AI is catalysing the shift towards models built around assured outcomes. Organisation today are adopting agentic AI across sectors:
Healthcare: Agents are autonomously classifying and summarising appeals, while also making decisions about medical necessities. Agents are also able to specialise in medication compliance, payer validation and preventing fraud.
Finance: Agentic AI are assisting banks, partners and consumers across validation requirements including Know Your Customer, while also minimising transaction vulnerability.
Marketing: AI agents are capable of analysing and categorising user profiles to enable hyper-personalised recommendations.
Automotive: In manufacturing, agentic AI is being deployed to analyse regulatory warning letters and citations. These agents could even be specialised to analyse root cause of defects and initiate corrective actions.
Supply Chain & Logistics: AI agents can help businesses with purchasing workflows & processes, also monitor adoption, performance, and return on investments.
These real-world applications showcase how agentic AI today are being deployed across organisations to enable resilient data-driven operations and optimise networks. AI agents not only boost productivity, but also unlock new capabilities like taking initiatives, making decisions and collaborating with humans in entirely new ways, helping organisations build a bold new business landscape.
A New Investment Mandate for the Future
Ultimately, the shift to value-first technology investment isn’t just a passing trend, but a strategic reset of how enterprises define progress. As mentioned earlier, success is no longer about technology adoption, but how effectively they deliver measurable outcomes. In this context, agentic AI acts as a catalyst that enables accountability, autonomy and direct impact into business operations. For enterprises, the mandate is clear – prioritise investments that translate to measurable business value, scale what works and build ecosystems where technology that proves it worth.