@levie: Just coming off of meetings with a couple dozen enterprise IT leaders discussing AI agents. Here are a few of the commo…
Summary
A summary of common themes from meetings with enterprise IT leaders discussing AI agents, including challenges with operating models, data fragmentation, defining data moats, metrics for AI adoption, multi-model strategies, talent shortages, and transformative use cases.
View Cached Full Text
Cached at: 07/08/26, 05:41 AM
Just coming off of meetings with a couple dozen enterprise IT leaders discussing AI agents. Here are a few of the common themes that stand out:
-
Lots of conversation that you have to solve an operating model challenge to get the full benefits of AI. Most companies have orgs that have always operated in siloes; but agents are most effectively when they are tied to a process, which often cuts across these siloes. So the big question is how do you start to deploy centrally managed agents that can work across organizational boundaries. Who manages these agents? How do they get deployed and adopted?
-
Data fragmentation remains a major issue for most organizations. As long as data remains highly fragmented and not in standard formats, or data is not available to the right people and agents, enterprises are dealing with issues around being able to get answers from agents that are accurate or that conform to their business practices. This cuts across both systems with structured data (product metrics or revenue figures) and unstructured data (product roadmap or customer contracts).
-
Clear sense that companies need to figure out what their core data moats are going to be in the future. If everyone has access to roughly the same superintelligence from the various models, then the context that you feed the models becomes proprietary value in the future. Capturing this data and getting it into a format that agents can use becomes very important.
-
Everyone is trying to figure out the right metrics to manage to for AI adoption. General consensus that tokens are not the right metric per se, and people leaning more toward business outcomes (in an ideal world). For business outcomes (like more revenue or more shipped product), though, you have to get close to each individual workflow to figure out if it was successfully transformed with AI so it’s harder to manage top down.
-
Growing view that enterprises are going to live in a multi-model world. Lots of interest (though early in actual adoption) in layers that can route workloads to different models (frontside or open weights) for cost or performance reasons. Also enterprises are trying to figure out what things do you give to the models directly vs. what do you separate as horizontal systems and context so you can swap any system in and out.
-
Talent for driving AI adoption and implementation still remains a major issue and topic. Many view it as something you necessarily have to train for internally due to a shortage of talent being trained on this in the outside. As an aside, this feels like it remains a huge opportunity for those that get very good at deploying and management agents in an enterprise since most companies are looking for these skills.
-
The best use-cases for AI tend to be those that fundamentally change the work being done instead of just replacing an existing process and doing it more efficiently. Companies are working through their versions of this individually because it’s different per industry, but this often remains both the most exciting and higher upside uses of AI.
Many more topics discussed recently, but overall it’s clear that there’s a ton of change going on with much more to come.
Similar Articles
@levie: The deployment of AI in the enterprise beyond just interacting with a chatbot will unequivocally take real work to alig…
Aaron Levie discusses the significant challenges of deploying AI agents in enterprise workflows, including fragmented data, legacy systems, and the need for change management, highlighting the growing role of deployment companies.
@levie: This is a great post if youre thinking about applied AI in the enterprise. The headline of this post is about what comp…
The article discusses how AI transformation in the enterprise requires changing underlying workflows and deploying agents against business processes, rather than just rolling out tools to end users. It emphasizes deep domain expertise, data organization, and comprehensive evaluations for ROI.
Agentic AI in Big Tech and Enterprise
A firsthand perspective from an enterprise R&D manager on the realities of AI adoption in large companies, highlighting gaps between executive expectations and actual productivity improvements, and the challenges of getting teams to use AI tools effectively.
@levie: The past couple months we may be witnessing what the Applied AI layer will look like at scale. Despite some of the init…
An analysis of the emerging applied AI layer in enterprises, outlining key components such as building workflow-specific features, intelligent model routing, change management via FDEs, and domain-specific go-to-market strategies. Argues that this layer will create sustainable moats and value despite some critiques.
@levie: A common trend emerging in larger enterprises is token budgeting as a major topic. As agents can do more and more long …
The article discusses the emerging trend of token budgeting in enterprises, highlighting the need for new management tools as AI agents consume significant compute resources. It suggests this will create a startup opportunity for software solutions that provide visibility and control over agentic spend.