AI Efforts Falling Flat? It Might Be The Use Case.

Ready to dive into AI, companies are now asking themselves: Where do we get started?

While Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble and others showcase the power of new agentic AI technology, many other enterprises are still struggling to build momentum. Projects are too costly, too risky or too inaccurate to move beyond the experimentation stage. Infrastructure investments, including in centralized orchestration platforms, will help address some of these challenges, as will new employee upskilling efforts. But ultimately, creating a sustainable and scalable AI strategy starts with choosing the right use case.

“You can buy the product, you can install the product, that’s the easy part. The harder part really comes down to adoption. How are you going to use that tool? How is it going to be consumed? What are the right use cases, and the business value it’s going to produce?,” Rajeev Khanna, Aon’s Global Chief Technology Officer, said on a recent episode of the “New Automation Mindset” podcast.

In the beginning, it’s a delicate balance: picking investments that won’t tarnish the company’s reputation if they fail, while also being bold enough to tackle projects that can prove the transformative power of the technology. Every company will need to find their own equilibrium between these sometimes competing demands. But one common piece of advice from technology leaders? Think in workflows.

“True enterprise adoption…involves orchestration and scaling across the organization. Very few organizations have truly reached this level, and even those are only scratching the surface,” Ryan Teeples, CTO of 1-800Accountant, told the Wall Street Journal.

• Key to this new workflow-centric approach are APIs, which serve as the orchestrators for agentic AI: "APIs are going to be central to getting real value from agentic AI,” Rebecca Fox, group CIO at cybersecurity consultancy NCC Group, told CIO.com. “APIs are the glue — without them, agentic AI can’t effectively combine or orchestrate processes across different systems.”

And ultimately, the investments need to generate results that convince leaders to allocate more funds to scaling new use cases: AI experimentation “has to be tied to a real outcome that moves the needle for us,” Coca-Cola CIO Neeraj Tolmare told Fortune. “We are all about scale.”

Below is additional advice from CIOs and other technology leaders on getting started with agentic AI:

• Human touchpoint? Try an API: “AI-ready APIs paired with multi-agentic capabilities can unlock a broad range of use cases, which have enterprise workflows at their heart,” Milind Naphade, SVP of technology and head of AI foundations at Capital One, told CIO.com. “Many enterprise workflows can be reimagined as a specific instance of this multi-agentic conversational AI workflow technology,” he added. ‍
• KPIs for measurable ROI: “Breaking work into AI-enabled tasks and aligning them to KPIs not only drives measurable ROI, it also creates a better customer experience by surfacing critical information faster than a human ever could,” Ryan said.
• When it doubt, target stressful areas: “Our restaurants, frankly, can be very stressful. We have customers at the counter, we have customers at our drive-through, couriers coming in for delivery, delivery at curbside. That’s a lot to deal with for our crew,” McDonald’s CIO Brian Rice told the Wall Street Journal. “Technology solutions will alleviate the stress.”