AI is now moving from experimentation to action. Its economic value will depend on the connectivity of the information system and trust governance extended to agents and humans alike.
For two years, companies sought to understand what artificial intelligence could do. They compared models, multiplied experiments and identified hundreds of use cases. This first step was essential: it made it possible to measure the potential of generative AI and to democratize its uses. But a new phase is now opening.
The question is no longer whether an agent is capable of writing a report, responding to a client or producing an analysis. It is knowing how to enable it to act at the heart of the company. Because this is where the true economic value of AI will be created: when it no longer simply assists employees, but directly participates in the execution of business processes.
In customer services, financial departments, operations or human resources, the first autonomous agents are already starting to coordinate several applications, trigger actions and support teams in the execution of complex tasks. We are no longer in a logic of one-off automation. We are gradually entering an organization where humans and agents collaborate on a daily basis.
This development marks a change in nature more than a change in technology.
Agents do not replace information systems, they rely on them
For several decades, companies have invested in connecting their applications, structuring their data and standardizing their processes. These investments today constitute a strategic heritage. Contrary to an idea often conveyed, agentic AI does not replace these foundations: it depends on them.
An agent never acts in a vacuum. To book a service, update a contract, initiate a reimbursement or orchestrate a supply chain, they must access relevant data, understand business rules, interact with multiple applications and comply with company security policies. Its effectiveness therefore relies less on its reasoning skills than on its ability to fit into an already existing environment.
This is why connectivity is becoming a strategic issue: the more a company has a coherent information system, the more it is able to quickly transform the intelligence of its agents into capacity for action. Integration thus ceases to be a purely technical question. It becomes the operational basis of the agentic company.
Evolve the foundations rather than rebuild the architecture
Faced with this new generation of uses, the temptation could be to add a new technological layer to each innovation: a platform for models, another for exchange protocols, a third to supervise agents or control inference costs.
Yet the history of digital transformation shows that the most resilient organizations are rarely those that rebuild their architecture with each disruption. They are the ones who know how to evolve the foundations they have patiently built.
The principles that made it possible to connect applications on a large scale (identity, governance, traceability, access policies or supervision) have lost none of their relevance. They must now extend to interactions between applications, data, models and AI agents. The challenge is not to create parallel governance for artificial intelligence, but to extend a single trust framework to all of these new uses.
This approach makes it possible to respond to a challenge that has become central: moving from a few promising experiments to thousands of agents capable of acting in a coherent, secure and responsible manner throughout the organization.
Governance becomes an accelerator of the agentic enterprise
For a long time, governance and innovation have been presented as two contradictory imperatives. The more an organization sought to control its systems, the more it seemed to slow down its ability to innovate. AI reverses this logic.
When hundreds of agents interact with enterprise applications and data, governance is no longer an administrative constraint. It becomes the condition which makes it possible to deploy these new uses on a large scale, without increasing the risks, costs or complexity.
Competitive advantage will therefore not lie in the number of agents that a company will be able to deploy. It will depend on its ability to offer them an environment in which they can act with the same level of security, traceability and responsibility as the employees they support.
For thirty years, digital transformation has been about connecting systems. The next decade will be about orchestrating cooperation between humans and artificial intelligences within the same framework of trust. More than a technological evolution, it is a new stage in the way of conceiving the company. And this is undoubtedly where the next frontier of competitiveness will be played out: not in the power of models, but in the capacity of organizations to transform this intelligence into action, on a large scale, with complete confidence.
