A small sampling of business owners and senior decision makers who responded to a recent KPMG LLP survey sheds some surprising light on their use of emerging technologies: Most have heard of agentic artificial intelligence (AI), more than half plan to invest in it within six months and 27 per cent have already deployed agentic AI in their organizations.
“Almost nine in 10 Canadian business leaders see agentic AI as a top investment priority that will help their organizations gain a competitive edge,” Stephanie Terrill, Canadian managing partner for digital and transformation at KPMG said in a statement about the poll. “We expect awareness of agentic AI to grow rapidly in the months ahead and more Canadian organizations will continue to experiment with and invest in the technology – perhaps even more so than generative AI.”
What is agentic AI?
According to Wikipedia, “agentic AI is a class of artificial intelligence that focuses on autonomous systems that can make decisions and perform tasks without human intervention. The independent systems automatically respond to conditions, to produce process results.”
The nascent technology can operate independently using large language models (LLMs) to make decisions and perform tasks with minimal or no human intervention, KPMG continues, adding that AI agents can respond to customer inquiries, place and track orders, build lead generation lists and manage refunds.
Among the survey’s respondents, 38 per cent said customer service was the technology’s top use, followed by 30 per cent who said cybersecurity could be helped by AI agents and 29 per cent who said compliance and regulatory management – automating compliance checks and reporting requirements – was a top use for the technology.
“With generative AI, organizations deployed chatbots to respond to customer inquiries about refunds. In the era of agentic AI, those chatbots not only respond to queries for refunds, they issue those refunds quickly,” Terrill adds.
Workforces worried
With agentic AI’s ability to make decisions on its own, 72 per cent said there is concern among their employees that agentic AI will replace them. Perhaps rightfully so: 82 per cent of the 252 Canadian business leaders surveyed said agentic AI would help their organizations reduce headcount.
“While most respondents agreed agentic AI would bring value to their organizations, more than half (55 per cent) said their workforce is not ready to work with or alongside AI agent; nearly nine in 10 (89 per cent) said their organization will need to invest in significant education, upskilling and workforce training to understand agentic AI's capabilities before adopting it,” KPMG states.
“While it may be tempting for some organizations to use agentic AI to reduce labour costs, there are other, more significant costs associated with reducing headcount – including loss of institutional knowledge, reputational damage and employee morale and loyalty,” KPMG’s AI lead in Canada, Gary Filan warns. “There are ways to strategically reorganize the workforce around AI.”
