David Droga – who often says he leads the world’s largest creative technology company – believes autonomous AI agents and agentic workforces would “more than” upturn everything in most business and workforce capabilities. 

Unlike the earlier, simpler versions of bots and more recently co-pilots, autonomous agents have broader capabilities and can take action.

“Out of all the things that I've been exposed to – and I go to the belly of the beast on all these things with all the tech companies … I talk to my kids more about that than anything,” Droga told Mi3 after his on-stage appearance.

“They have to understand what it is, the opportunity – and we need their fresh brains on it because it's inevitable that it's going to take over so many jobs. As I said on stage, it's going to do a better job than a lot of other things.”

The battle for first mover advantage for agentic builds and deployments among tech vendors and firms like Accenture Song and the other large consulting firms is underway. 

Land grab

Salesforce, which late last year spearheaded the tech vendor move from co-pilots to autonomous agents – and a feisty competitive shot at Microsoft and Open AI’s co-pilot rollout – is pouring millions into marketing to stake its claim as the leader in agentic.

Salesforce used Hollywood actors Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson to front two Superbowl campaigns for its “Agentforce” launch. Salesforce APAC Chief Marketing Officer, Leandro Perez, said the “number of people that searched ‘agent’ and ‘agentforce’ had seen something like a 3,000 per cent increase to our website.”

In Australia, Perez is doing likewise, buying CBD billboards, trams and launching sponsorships and marketing alliances with Formula 1, cricket, Forbes and the AFR to ensure businesses large and small associate agents with Salesforce. 

Six months max

“We feel we have a window of about six months where we're trying to be first mover here," Perez told Mi3. “Will there be a moment where everyone understands this? No. For the people that should know, if they don't within the next six months, they'll just be left behind.

“We've really shown that [agents] are a true market versus co-pilots – a lot of people went early and they couldn't see the ROI. Co-pilots are a nice little productivity hack. They give you a five per cent improvement in your time … it doesn't take away any of your problems. If it's not taking action, it's doing what a co-pilot does.”

Perez claimed “everyone's pivoted their market strategy” to agents. “We’re in front and we'll keep innovating, but everyone's going to be trying to do what we're doing now."         

Fisher & Paykel has gone early with Salesforce on agents – Chief Digital Officer Rudi Khoury told Mi3 the company was working on multiple deployments. 

“We've played with every single co-pilot there is. The challenge with co-pilots… and what they're missing is a reasoning engine on top of the LLM to actually understand the topic and question that it's being asked, then be able to coordinate responses that are more relevant and accurate.”

A use case which Fisher & Paykel sees as imminent is in customer service.

“If you need help with your oven, it goes back and forth with you maybe troubleshooting around your oven. If at the end, you need someone to come and service or maintain it, it’s able to take you from that chat experience into a booking experience digitally," he said. "If there's an action required, like you've got an order you need to change, it helps you change the order, not just tell you how to change the order.”

Big consulting firms like Accenture, Deloitte and KPMG typically strike lucrative alliances with tech vendors for business transformation programs and also generate fee income with bespoke deployments of new tech like AI. But Salesforce is also having a chip at those firms with its market strategy admonishing companies to “don’t DIY your AI”.

“What the CIOs will do is they'll probably want to try to build something... you're going to spend a long time doing it, it's fraught with risk,” Perez said.

Responsibly wrong

Still, David Droga sees agents and AI as the top agenda item for his business and individuals because of the jobs that will go and the disruption they will create for enterprise.

But he challenged the business community to not ignore human-led creativity, innovation and lateral thinking for “best practice and processes”. Start with the customer or consumer need and “work backwards”, he said, pointing to many apps which “in most categories, not everyone, but a lot of categories, they’re actually all the same. It feels like box ticking. Sometimes companies start with best practices and process to get somewhere, and they get sort of caught up in what I call responsibly wrong.”

Synthetics incoming

Droga also said “synthetic” customers and personas are another big ticket item on his agenda.

Synthetic customers and consumers are essentially constructed in their thousands, sometimes millions, with AI to mirror real world people in different demographics, life stages and cultures. Some in B2B businesses are already building synthetic CEOs, CFOs and other c-suite functions to predict their interest or response to initiatives and developments.

“You can get real time results and test new products,” Droga told Business Summit delegates. “You can test marketing campaigns. You can test all these different things … it's been used in government, where we get results in hours, as opposed to four or five months of trials.” 

He cited a recent Accenture investment in a US start-up polling firm using synthetic consumers.

“It’s unbelievable, the three founders, two of them are 19, one of them is 16 – and the 16 year old was at MIT when he was 13 – they predicted everything within 99 ... basically almost 100 per cent of every result in the last election.”