How to Create an Intelligent Enterprise with Agentic AI

Success is no longer defined by how big your company is or how great your digital services are. It’s defined by being intelligent.

For more than a decade, data and IT leaders faced a monumental challenge: digitalisation. After inheriting systems built for stability, enterprise CIOs had to evolve IT infrastructures rapidly, optimising for speed and agility to deliver digital-first experiences before disruptors ate their lunch.

Now, it’s time to leap forward once again – from digital to intelligent experiences. And we must act now, because just as before, there are AI-native businesses entering every sector and it’s happening faster than ever.

Creating an intelligent enterprise means bringing trusted data to AI, and leveraging it to create new intelligent experiences and operations.

So how can data and IT leaders guide their organisations through this new period of transformation and carve a path to success for the next decade?

What is an intelligent enterprise?

The intelligent enterprise is a workforce where people are augmented by AI, underpinned by a solid foundation of trusted data. 

Agentic AI is core to the capabilities of the intelligent enterprise – and that’s because it works differently to its AI predecessors. 

We started with predictive AI, using machine learning to spot patterns and forecast what might happen next. Then came generative AI – models that could create content: text, images, video, code, etc.

Now we’ve in the agentic AI era. This isn’t just about generating outputs – it’s about acting on them. It’s conversational, context-aware and autonomous. 

The implications for customer service teams are huge. AI agents can enable interactions that are genuinely meaningful, hyper personalised and accessible all day, every day.

For example, Heathrow Airport delivers individualised support and faster service for customers with 90% of conversations resolved by their AI agent, Hallie, without a live human agent transfer.

Whilst many organisations are starting their agentic transformation in customer service, there are near limitless opportunities to unlock new levels of productivity across the business – and outcomes can be improved from the front to the middle and back office. 

And with new use cases emerging for agents operating between separate companies, there’s much more to come.

How to transform successfully with agentic AI

1. Plan for your people 

Embracing this new era is a human-change challenge, as much as it is a technology-change challenge. Humans will stay at the heart of the intelligent enterprise; even where agents are used, human judgement will be needed, to own intent, risk and accountability.

Some roles will change, with human work shifting from execution to oversight. There will also be new roles, from agent designers who shape prompts, flows and guardrails to AI supervisors who track performance across humans and agents at scale.

CIOs must help to shape a vision that’s compelling enough to bring the whole business on board, as well as helping to uplevel understanding of AI throughout the organisation.

2. Address the data challenge 

An intelligent enterprise is built on context – derived from secure, trusted, well-understood data. Research shows that data quality is the most important thing you can do to secure AI success and security is paramount for using AI safely and responsibly. 

It’s time to finally crack the data challenge, with customer data foundations built to last and support successful AI throughout the business.

Review your data strategy alongside any agentic AI deployments, and consider technology that brings everything into one place with a 360-degree view of all your enterprise data, like Salesforce Data 360. 

3. Get started 

The most important advice for becoming an intelligent enterprise is simply to get going.

• Start small: Pick a repetitive workflow. Deploy a scoped agent. Measure outcomes.
• Build trust: Define policies. Monitor behaviour. Trust, but verify.
• Modernise the stack: Expose services. Connect data. Think in events, not screens.
• Prepare your team: Upskill for agent design, validation and oversight.
• Track what matters: Measure resolution time, outcome success, cost per action.

How Salesforce has transformed with agentic AI

At Salesforce, we’ve been undertaking intelligent transformation for several years now. Today, we have hundreds of agents supporting customers and augmenting colleagues across our business.

Salesforce has reimagined its entire operation as “Customer Zero” for intelligent transformation – transitioning from a digital enterprise into an agentic enterprise where autonomous agents augment humans to unlock endless capacity and 24/7 productivity. 

For example, in our service centre this transformation has already seen Agentforce handle over 2.4 million conversations autonomously – surpassing the 1.6 million handled by human engineers – and is projected to deliver $100 million in annual cost savings. 

Beyond customer service, the impact spans the entire business, saving 203,000 sales hours annually and projecting a 300,000 hour reduction in administrative tasks for engineering teams. 

By infusing intelligence into routine workflows and lead nurturing, our employees are now empowered to move away from busy work to higher-value, creative innovation.

Lessons from 500,000 Agentforce Customer Conversations – How AI Drives Empathy and Efficiency

Becoming an intelligent enterprise

IT and data leaders will be crucial to shaping successful intelligent transformation. It’s about much more than technology; it’s a sea change in what it means to be a business, and we must ensure people can enjoy the benefits.

But it’s not only down to CIOs. Whilst IT will be leading transformation across every department – it will take collaborating with other department heads, to deliver the outcomes they need and support every team and role.

Becoming an intelligent enterprise is a big undertaking, but it’s vital. The leaders who harness the power of agentic AI will win the next decade.

Watch my discussion with Rob Howe, SVP of Technology at Dojo, on how CIOs can ensure AI actually delivers in the Agents of Change series.