The hype around Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to build. Is it a fundamental shift for humanity or a bubble that will eventually burst?

In my opinion, it is both. There is no question that we are in a period of heightened excitement, with many over-inflated claims and businesses attempting to profit from the market turbulence.

However, there is also genuine innovation, supported by a perfect storm of computing capability, software sophistication, and data availability, backed by massive investment.

I believe that AI will transform the way we work, impacting every industry. Outlined below are my thoughts as to how this transformation could impact enterprise businesses.

AI agents will become increasingly powerful, with an ability to pursue goals, take action and learn autonomously.

These AI agents will be built on large-scale, general-purpose AI models, trained on vast amounts of data that can be applied to a wide range of tasks. This includes multimodal input and output (e.g., text, images, video), alongside the ability to break down complex problems into smaller steps to arrive at a more accurate and reliable conclusion.

Each AI agent will be grounded and provided with specific context, covering the business (e.g., framing, principles, policies, standards) and domain specialisation. In addition, AI agents will be granted access to specific data sources and tooling, with the appropriate permissions and approval to trigger actions.

This combination of knowledge, reasoning and action will allow an AI agent to learn and complete complex tasks, similar to a human worker.

An AI agent will not work in isolation; instead, they will collaborate, with each AI agent providing input based on their specialisation. Other AI agents will provide oversight (management), orchestrating the different inputs to achieve the desired goal.

This model, which is technically viable today, is a paradigm shift for how work gets done and could act as a force multiplier. This is because, for the first time, the human workforce will work alongside AI, partnering to achieve specific business outcomes.

These new human-centric, AI-powered teams are designed for rapid, on-demand scalability. By harnessing parallel processing, they achieve greater speed and agility, while their ability to ingest and contextualise insights from large, disparate data sources leads to significantly improved decision-making and precision.

A team that includes a human workforce and AI agents will inevitably outperform a team that is only comprised of humans.

This new way of working can lead to fear, with the concern that jobs will be replaced or lost. Although I believe this is true in certain circumstances, in many cases, I think these new human-centric, AI-powered teams will simply become more productive, delivering increased value and a higher return on investment.

Therefore, I believe it is in everyone’s best interest to embrace this future, where humans and machines partner to achieve outcomes. This requires individuals to upskill, with businesses looking to evolve their practices and processes.

The businesses that proactively engage with a clear strategy that embeds and prioritises AI, including the prerequisites regarding expertise and data, will succeed.

This will deliver a competitive advantage, differentiated from their peers and protected from disruption.

enterprise architecture ea enterprise_architecture artificial_intelligence ai machine_learning ml generative_ai agentic_ai large_language_model llm natural_language_processing nlp transformer data prompt_engineering model_context_protocol mcp strategy lifeinwork