How Agentic AI Is Reshaping Leadership and Enterprise – Shimmy Says EP12

Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel and you're watching another episode of Shimmy. Says, well, it's been a busy couple weeks here for me. I, I was out in San Francisco at one of my favorite conferences of the year, the RSAC conference, biggest Cybersecurity Conference in the World.

And I will tell you that, you know, the big, the big story at RSAC this year was, as it's been at every other conference, we've gone to ai, but a particular kind of AI for this year, and that is agentic ai. So the idea that we're not just gonna ask a chat bot to dazzle us with some brilliance of what it can put together, but really to have an agent, an AI agent, go out and perform a task for us. And that's what we mean by agentic ai.

That was the theme at RSA. It was also the theme this year for many, many companies, right? To me, it was really Salesforce that kind of kicked this off.

And you gotta give them credit for, you know, first bringing this out. Mark Benioff, you know, talked about Salesforce having thousands and thousands of, of agents out there, you know, that you can control with Salesforce. But just this past week we saw IBM put together, you know, they're announcing, they've put together a whole ecosystem of partners, and IBM has plenty of partners, uh, whose agents will be able to be controlled via IBM, the ServiceNow user Conference.

I think it's knowledge ServiceNow is out in, uh, Vegas, I believe. And, and they're, they announced like a control tower for agents. All of these point to a very specific kind of future for agents.

You're not gonna have an agent, you're not gonna have Hobbes or some personal attendant, and that's your agent who does everything. No, virtually every task you want done is gonna have the its own agent. It seems some of these agents may be rather ephemeral where they do their one task and they disappear, they're deleted.

Other agents may be reoccurring, but the, I think the general consensus is that we're gonna have literally an army of agents that perform all these different kinds of tasks for us. Each agent is not gonna be a Swiss Army knife. Each agent will have a unique task that it does.

It's kind of like in me, it, it evokes a vision of, uh, clone wars from Star Wars. Remember the, the army of the, of the clones and, and the, and the droids. Um, and if that is the future we're looking at, what does that mean?

Well, I think if you listen to ServiceNow, if you listen to Salesforce, if you listen to IBM, we're gonna need some sort of orchestrator, orchestrator or some sort of manager of agents, which may itself be an agent who knows it's an agent to, to manage your agents, or it's some sort of application that is your agent manager. And I think that the, the contenders are already lining up to be this manager of your agents, because I don't think you're gonna want to have multiple agent managers. It's bad enough.

We're gonna have all these agents. I think you probably want as few agent managers as you can. And why, why are all these big companies lining up to be your agent manager?

Well, to me, this is akin to the cloud native world, where, you know, I think quickly or early on, people realized that what Solomon hikes and the Docker team had done with containers was gonna fundamentally change the architecture of how our applications are run, right? A containerized architecture. Um, but being in a containerized architecture means that you're gonna have, um, multiple containers, dozens, hundreds, or more containers per application, right?

And, and so you needed something that was going to orchestrate or manage those containers, Kubernetes, right? And Kubernetes, you know, if you would've asked early on what was gonna be the big, uh, container orchestrator, the big container manager, people probably would've said something like Docker swarm, maybe rancher, but no, the open source product that Google first called the Borg, right? And renamed Kubernetes came out and has dominated ever since, and is really, look, it's the linchpin of the whole cloud native world.

I think we're looking at a, at a, you know, a, a similar, similar type of scenario with agents who, whoever ever develops, what becomes the defacto standard for agent management will dominate, right? Because I think every company will have an agent, multiple agents. As I said, most of these agents will be single use, single purpose agents.

But the, the company that allows you to manage them, the company that gather, orchestrates them, the company that directs them, is gonna be a vital company in your pantheon of tools, of it tools. So it's no wonder that I, that companies like ServiceNow and IBM and, and Salesforce, and you'll see Microsoft in there, and maybe Apple and others are all already vying to be your agent manager. When, quite frankly, as we stand here right now, and again, something I I noticed at RSA right now, it's a lot to do about nothing.

How many of us are truly, truly using agentic AI or AI empowered agents to get tasks done? And I sort saw a study at, uh, RSA, they said something like, well, you know, within two years, 75% of organizations will be using AI empowered agents, maybe. But how many will they be using?

Will they be really useful? I, not that I'm poo-pooing that agents won't be useful, AI agentic ai, but I just think it's gonna take time for us to use them, trust them, and then we'll worry about managing armies of agents. Until then, though, you know, much like Star Wars, a good Jedi Knight's worth an army of clones.

So, uh, I, I don't know if we're ready for the agentic a, you know, these Agentic AI agents may not be the agents you're looking for right now. Anyway, that's it on Shimmy says this week. I hope you've enjoyed it.

Uh, we'll see you next week. We're watching what's going on. In the meantime, catch us on Textron tv, Textron Gang.

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