Autonomous AI agents on the rise

This is the year of AI agents.

The last few months of 2024 brought much talk about and expectations for AI agents that can operate autonomously and semi-autonomously. Many vendors have capitalized on the enthusiasm to introduce new agentic products: Salesforce came out with Agentforce, and Microsoft introduced Copilot agents.

With 2025 here, questions about whether the momentum on agents will continue. Some see the agentic hype, and real progress, persisting this year.

Craig Le Clair, a Forrester Research analyst and author of the soon-to-be-published book Random Acts of Automation, is among those who think AI agents will continue to gain momentum in the new year.

"It's the biggest change toward AGI [artificial general intelligence] that I've seen," Le Clair said on the latest episode of Informa TechTarget's Targeting AI podcast, referring to the concept of AI that is as smart or smarter than human intelligence.

Enterprises will likely adjust the ways they use applications that use AI agents as copilots to augment humans, because many of those applications are not profitable, he said. However, AI agents will be the driving force in helping enterprises build platforms that use generative AI technology to spur business value, he said.

"When you really start to turn piles of data into conversations with people ... that's the opportunity for this," Le Clair said. "For an employee to have a conversation with standard operating procedures to get advice on what to do, or for standard operating procedures to be taken out of that PDF repository and actually put into a prompt and generate tasks that are then followed by an agent to get something done -- the potential is really there."

As with all new technology, AI agents involve a trust issue. Enterprises still do not trust the technology to be fully autonomous and perform tasks from start to finish all on its own, Le Clair said.

However, organizations can rely on AI agents to perform part of the work with the assistance of a human in the loop.

With the speed of the technology's maturation, progress toward fully autonomous agents by 2028 is likely, Le Clair predicted.

Esther Shittu is an Informa TechTarget news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems. Shaun Sutner is senior news director for Informa TechTarget's information management team, driving coverage of artificial intelligence, unified communications, analytics and data management technologies. Together, they host the Targeting AI podcast series.