- A Cisco report reveals that 80% of executives view agentic AI as critical to their business success by 2027.
- Jobs aren’t being lost to AI, they’re just undergoing big changes
- 55% will work with AI agents, 60% of workforce needs upskilling
According to new data from a joint report from Cisco and Omdia, four in five executives believe their companies’ survival could depend on agentic AI as early as 2027, and more than half (55%) of the workforce is expected to collaborate with AI agents in the next two years.
But even as business leaders recognize the potential of AI, many have yet to lay the foundations needed to truly take advantage of it, and existing infrastructure is proving to be one of the biggest obstacles.
Cisco says more robust, secure and agile networks are needed to support AI tools and agents working across diverse infrastructures, including applications, clouds and data..
Agentic AI is almost here at scale
Senior Vice President of Portfolio Strategy Jeff Schultz described agentic AI as the “catalyst for the most significant workforce transformation in a generation” and the emphasis is on “transformation.” Because the report details how AI’s impact on the workforce is shifting from eliminating jobs to changing jobs, which is good news for humans after all.
Nearly two in three (65%) expect new job categories to emerge over the next three to five years, and many have not yet appointed Chief AI Officers at the C-suite level.
But this comes at a cost: three out of five employees will need to upskill “to go beyond rapid engineering, to learn to supervise, audit and trust autonomous agents”. Schultz described this change as both “technological” and “cultural.”
The report adds that agentic AI now accounts for more than a third (37%) of early adopter technology budgets, with 43% already reporting significant ROI and 39% expecting returns within just a year.
“How technology leaders respond today will shape the relative success of their organizations tomorrow,” concluded Schultz, emphasizing that companies’ first steps should be to put the right infrastructure and foundation layers in place before blindly diving into AI.
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