Photo of a robot examining an invoice with a magnifying glass.
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Pascal Breyer, the company’s chief innovation officer, said in an interview with CNBC that the company is already “having discussions with companies about this agent technology.”
He added that applications using multiple autonomous agents are “something to expect next year.”
Capgemini defines an AI agent as “technology designed to function independently, plan, reflect, pursue high-level goals, and execute complex workflows with minimal direct human oversight.” So, essentially, they are AI agents that work behind the scenes to complete tasks on your behalf.
The United States is making progress on this technology, but Europe is lagging behind, according to Breyer.
In a new research report released on Monday titled “Harnessing the Value of Generative AI,” Capgemini noted that the majority of companies surveyed (82%) plan to integrate AI agents within the next one to three years, while only 7% have no plans to integrate these agents.
The study was based on a survey of more than 1,100 companies with revenues of more than $1 billion.
Breyer said so-called AI agents fall into two types: individual agents that carry out tasks on behalf of users, and multi-agent technology, or “agents talking to each other.”
For example, a marketing-focused AI agent creating an advertising campaign for an organization in Germany can autonomously collaborate with another agent in the same organization’s legal department to ensure the campaign is legally sound.
Unlike traditional AI systems that simply follow instructions, these agents are “capable of understanding, interpreting, adapting and acting autonomously, even replacing human workers for certain tasks,” Capgemini said.
The first big wave of AI in 2022 is what Brier calls “V1,” which was “understanding what a prompt is, understanding what an LLM is.” [large language model] “It was,” Breier told CNBC.
“Now, AI and generative AI are getting closer and closer, and it’s becoming about building knowledge engines, interacting with those engines using generative AI, and then using this new concept of an agent as a proxy or co-pilot that finds and does things on our behalf,” he said.
According to Capgemini, 71% of organizations expect AI agents to drive automation, and 64% of businesses expect them to free human workers from repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on value-added functions such as customer experience.
Capgemini said in the report that there has been a four-fold increase in the number of organizations that now have generative AI integrated into some or most of their locations or functions. According to Capgemini, the number of companies that will be adopting generative AI in 2023 was 6%, but this year that number is growing to 24%.
However, while business adoption levels are increasing among larger enterprises, the same phenomenon is yet to be seen among SMEs.
According to the report, 10% of companies with annual revenues between $1 billion and $5 billion have adopted generative AI, and that number rises to 49% for companies with annual revenues of $20 billion or more.
“Large companies are running generative AI experiments at a larger scale, so they have more opportunity to measure results, they can do it more quickly, and they’ve obviously invested more in them than smaller companies,” Breyer told CNBC.
Results also vary by industry: In aerospace and defense, 88% of organizations are investing in generative AI, but in retail, that number drops to 66%.
