Enterprises increasingly want to deploy AI agents to improve their data workflows and reach better business decisions, but they and their technology partners are still working out how to best do it.
IT Europa attended this week’s Informatica World Tour event at London’s Oval cricket ground, to find out how businesses and channel partners in the data management space can tackle the hurdles when adopting AI in key operations.
Main areas to focus on when approaching the adoption of AI agents, include:
-The major shift from deterministic workflows to reasoning-based, multi-step processes.
-Purpose-built AI agents are still in the early stages, but they’re designed to open up entirely new ways of connecting, integrating and managing data.
-From initial release to wider availability, the distribution and performance of AI agents can be improved using feedback loops to prepare them for scale.
-Agents can often use existing platform capabilities in new ways, such as applying them in real time within other application workflows.
-The number of different agents and their capabilities are expected to grow, and combining them can support ever more complex enterprise tasks.
-Purpose-built agents are different from previous automation, enabling reasoning and handling tasks that were much harder to automate before.
But what of the AI agents market at the moment? Speaking at the event, Amit Walia, CEO of Informatica, said: “It’s still early days, but the business growth we see ahead of us is based on how we can leverage AI. Yes, there is the hype curve, and a lot of AI projects are not bearing fruit and are failing.
“But I see nothing different from what has gone on before, just like when e-commerce came along, for instance, there were a lot of dead bodies before e-commerce became what it is now in our lives.”
He went on: “It’s obviously all about the data when it comes to AI. And with agents, they can be everywhere, and it’s our job to make sure they do a good job. With hundreds of agents around an enterprise, it’s important to manage the workflows correctly.”
Walia said there were five pillars when it came to successfully turning a digital enterprise to an AI enterprise: data, process, governance, ethics, and responsibility.
Informatica actually launched it’s first AI solution, CLAIRE, as part of its main Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) platform in 2018. CLAIRE has evolved since generative AI became a big thing in the industry a couple of years ago, and there are now CLAIRE agents covering data quality, data discovery, data ingestion, data exploration, data lineage, modernisation, and product experience, for instance.
But customers have a lot of different business apps, including many that compete with Informatica in the market. So Informatica will next month launch its AI Agent Engineering platform, to help bring all apps together when it comes to developing, deploying and managing comprehensive agentic workflows.
The new platform will enable all agents to “talk the same language”, promises Informatica, so customers and channel partners can build “more accurate” agents, connect agents across the enterprise, and manage agents “with confidence”.
At the Oval, Norwegian paint manufacturer JOTUN gave us a snapshot of how to prepare for an AI and AI agent deployment. Gro Kamfjord, business intelligence manager at the company, said businesses should first address data competence development, develop a data ownership programme, and adopt a modern data and data integration plan.
Firms also needed “data fluent” managers to track projects, business data “stewards” to monitor the data, and business data owners to take overall responsibility for specific datasets. Combined, they would be responsible for cataloguing, business processing, governance, and data quality.
“Prerequisites for a successful strategy are competence, roles and responsibilities, direction and planning, and organisational readiness,” said Kamfjord.
More to follow from the Informatica World Tour at the Oval cricket ground…
Picture: Surrey versus Nottinghamshire that took place during the event, Notts won by 20 runs.
