Post by Aaron Levie on AI Agents Day 19; 23 Days Of Open AI At sxsw

Met with a dozen IT leaders from a range of industries last night and it’s clear that we’re seeing a shift of AI moving from just being about Assistants you chat with to Agents that go out and execute work for you. 

In similar conversations just 6 months ago, the idea of AI Agents was fairly foreign in most organizations. Now it’s becoming more and more clear to companies that this is where a substantial portion of impact of AI is going to come from. It’s pretty insane how quickly this conversation has evolved.

Interestingly, many of the biggest use cases for AI Agents that companies have right now aren’t just replacing what existing work is already getting done. There’s certainly “I’d love to get people out of doing X manual process”, but there generally is a larger number of “what if we could finally do Y”. There’s a sense that AI Agents will let companies go and solve the long tail of problems they just didn’t get around to before, or never did that well at. 

Interestingly, the demand for AI and AI Agents is coming from every direction. New employees are expecting a modern AI stack to work with, which puts pressure on the organization to modernize. Similarly, there’s a pressure from above and from within the business as companies have to figure out what it looks like to be AI-first in the future. Either way, these dynamics are being embraced quite energetically — even though there’s definitely a sense that things are moving faster than they ever have and it’s hard to keep up.

It’s also clear that agent interoperability will be critical, as enterprises are trying to figure out how cross-platform workflows will be handled in the future. No one wants to be stuck on a single rigid architecture that’s going to lock all their workflows into one approach. Agent-to-agent communications will clearly be a big part of solving this going forward. 

We’re clearly still very early, with most enterprises only in the initial phases of exploring (and doing initial deployments of) Agents. But it’s clear that this will be *the* topic in the enterprise this year.