From automation to agentic: building a workable autonomous enterprise

Artificial intelligence promises to boost efficiency, cut costs and improve service, and businesses have invested heavily in the technology. According to Foundry’s 2025 AI Priorities Study, nearly half of enterprises now have a dedicated AI budget.

However, initial results have been mixed. A study by Genpact found that despite the proliferation of AI projects, only 35% of firms found they were “very effective at delivering measurable business value.”

Organisations often focus on early commoditised tasks for AI. These are lower risk but offer a more limited return on investment. The next generation of projects could change this.

Agentic AI creates enterprise systems with significantly higher levels of independence. They can reason, decide and execute autonomously, creating self-managing business processes and ultimately, an autonomous enterprise. In its report, Autonomy by design: Scaling AI for enterprise value, Genpact describes the autonomous enterprise as having “AI embedded across the business as it connects workflows and orchestrates agents, making decisions in real time.”

Human-AI teaming

Already, enterprises are driving efficiencies by teaming “fleets” of smart agents with human operators. This goes beyond automation, or even machine learning.

AI agents bridge the gaps between separate, unconnected and even siloed business systems in a way even generative AI cannot. Agentic systems use multiple specialist —and often more efficient and lightweight — models to tackle clearly defined tasks.

“Most organisations still depend heavily on human agents supported by manual processes and disconnected tools,” says Nuno Lopes, vice president and global ServiceNow practice leader at Genpact. “Agentic AI fundamentally changes this model by enabling a coordinated ecosystem of AI agents that can autonomously execute work at scale. Humans remain firmly in the loop, providing the oversight, governance and strategic control needed to ensure these AI agents operate within clearly defined enterprise boundaries and guardrails.”

In a recent project in the securities, asset and wealth management industry, Genpact helped a customer automate workflows and integrate AI. The result was a 20-30% improvement for both customer and agent experience.

Foundations

Such results, though, are only possible by building agentic technology on solid foundations.

Agentic AI demands comprehensive, good-quality data. And, if enterprises are to harness its potential, they need to understand the details of their business processes and identify how to streamline them.

“Organisations’ processes are often very fragmented and very manual,” says Lopes. “They have dozens or hundreds of applications that are not connected. Data doesn’t flow between them. It’s what we call ‘process debt;’ over time you end up with processes that are inefficient and have too many redundant, manual steps.”

Building an autonomous enterprise with agentic AI at its core should be a strategic project for a business. However, this is not something the business has to tackle alone. A mature organisation will use its partnerships to tap into industry and technology expertise.

By partnering with ServiceNow, which provides the enterprise workflow and AI platform, Genpact helps organisations deploy agentic AI with a unified data model and unified process. So, as enterprises move towards agentic AI and autonomy, they have assurance it is done in a safe, secure and effective way.

“Organisations must first get the fundamentals right,” advises Lopes. “That means establishing robust, well‑defined processes and a strong data foundation anchored in a single source of truth. Only then can AI be deployed effectively — so it delivers measurable value and works reliably at enterprise scale.”

It is those fundamentals that will transform organisations from automation to autonomy, with the tools to grow and innovate, despite today’s business and economic pressures.

For advice on moving to an autonomous enterprise with industry expertise from Genpact and technology from ServiceNow, click here.