In this two-part blog series, Principal Analysts Anthony McPartlin and Seth Marrs debate the idea of AI agents as coworkers. In this blog, Seth takes the perspective of the believer, while in the second blog, Anthony (ever the pragmatist) explains why this is overblown.

There’s no debate that the talk track that some vendors are using around AI agents is hyperbolic. Vendors large and small are making claims that just don’t hold up in the real world. This is especially true for enterprise organizations, where business complexity and compliance create an environment that many AI agents are not built to support … yet. The gap between an amazing demo and the ability to translate those features into your business has never been greater, but that doesn’t mean that this technology doesn’t have value today that will evolve into the way organizations work in the future.

AI Agents Are Following A Well-Trodden Path To Success

AI agents are gaining the most traction with small- and medium-sized businesses and the middle market. The barriers to adoption, risks, and business complexity are all lower, making this the perfect place for innovative technology companies to start. Over the years, most new sales tech started by delivering value for this customer base. Sales engagement, conversation intelligence, revenue operations and intelligence, and even new entrants to established categories such as sales planning management started here and expanded. AI agents are following the same path as the sales tech vendors before it.

Agent Coworkers: Reality Or Fiction?

Every year at Dreamforce, Salesforce touts a new technology as the “greatest new technology” with a significant amount of hype that typically fades and generates a limited market response. Last year, the stock price dropped 3% after Dreamforce. But this year, it jumped 4% after the event. The stock price is increasing based on Agentforce and shows that the company is meeting the moment. The bigger challenge for Salesforce is to deliver an innovative, cutting-edge product. The verdict is still out on that, but investment feeds innovation, so AI agents will become a reality, whether it’s Salesforce or someone else leading the way.

Why Start Working With AI Coworkers Now?

There is an opportunity for short- and long-term value for those who take the right steps. Taking the perspective of a believer, here are three ways to use AI agents to make a difference for your company right now:

  1. Build and grow your AI agent capabilities with non-customer-facing use cases. AI agents are doing amazing things, but they are far from perfect. For this reason, going all in on them with customer-facing use cases is risky. Instead, focus on areas where they can add value without being perfect. A great use case is seller roleplay. Right now, AI agents are good enough to help the seller get better but still make errors or say the wrong thing. Even with these issues, it’s still useful to the seller, so they will tolerate a goofy out-of-context response now and then.
  2. Use AI agents for challenging customer-facing use cases. Hearing sales tech vendors trying to convince companies to use an AI agent with customers that companies have spent a lot of money trying to acquire is nuts. That is one place where it’s worth investing in a human to engage. Instead, use AI agents in areas, such as non-work-hour responses, where your customers are getting a less-than-ideal experience. Also, this technology has extensive language capabilities, so it can help a company go to market in countries where language barriers prevented it in the past.
  3. Be realistic about what you want to accomplish. I like the term coworker because this technology needs to be trained in a way that is a lot closer to a human than to software and will learn and grow as it works with us. That being said, the technology as it is today cannot function like a human, even if the training of it makes you feel like it can. But it can do things like understand your ideal customer profile, help you identify prospects quicker, and make it easier to generate content to engage those prospects. Every coworker has unique skills, and AI agents are no exception. Use them in areas where they are useful enough to add value.