An Intellyx Brain Blog Post for Boomi by Eric Newcomer
The release of ChatGPT on November 20, 2022 launched the generative AI revolution and with it wave upon wave of more than the usual hype accompanying a game changing new technology. The hype made it seem like large language models (LLMs) were capable of anything.
As with the overall generative AI hype cycle, when the agentic AI hype cycle began around mid 2023, Bill Gates, Mark Benioff, and others predicted that AI agents would be capable of anything and would become the ubiquitous new method for human-computer interaction, dramatically changing the future of work.
Boomi CEO Steve Lucas, however, clearly understood the challenge of using generative AI from the beginning, and describes it in his best selling book, Digital Impact. He discusses the challenges created by this lack of understanding in the context of the recent MIT study documenting the high failure rate of generative AI projects.
“Agentic transformation is about rethinking workflows, not just digitizing them. It’s about blending deterministic processes (like payroll) with AI agents that can reason and handle probabilistic tasks like expense approvals to increase agility and efficiency,” Lucas said.
In other words, those who claimed that autonomous agents would be soon taking over the world were, to put it in AI terms, “hallucinating.” Instead of entirely replacing existing deterministic tasks, AI agents are best used to complement them with the kind of probabilistic tasks they are good at.
image by Google Gemini
