Agentic AI experiences will determine enterprise winners
Agentic AI experiences will determine enterprise winners
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...
Read moreAgentic AI to date has revolved around architecture, standards, use cases, process automation and productivity, but customer experiences and visions of reinventing categories are moving to the forefront.
Simply put, the agentic AI winners on both the buy side and sell side will likely be decided by customer experiences. This CX-meets-AI theme is already emerging on the consumer side. In recent weeks, we've seen the following:
- Google said Gemini is getting personal with Personal Intelligence, a setting that connects your personal Gmail, YouTube, Google Photos and other apps to Gemini. It's an interesting move that highlights how AI agents are going to create personalized experiences.
- OpenAI is planning on being a healthcare industry AI player with the launch of OpenAI for Healthcare, a HIPAA-compliant version of ChatGPT for clinicians, just days after debuting ChatGPT Health for consumers. The upshot here is that ChatGPT wants to be your healthcare front door. OpenAI also outlined its 2026 focus on practical AI.
- Anthropic also launched Claude for Healthcare, which aims to be "a complementary set of tools and resources that allow healthcare providers, payers, and consumers to use Claude for medical purposes through HIPAA-ready products." In addition, Anthropic launched Claude Cowork, which is a research preview that enables you to bring agentic tools to the desktop.
A card carrying cynic (guilty as charged) would note that these efforts are really about stepping in front of value chains to be the gatekeeper. If Google, OpenAI and Anthropic platforms become the primary distribution platform, they'll reap the AI rewards. But the real game in the enterprise trenches will revolve around agentic experience.
At three conferences this week (two investment meetups and National Retail Federation), the CX end of the agentic AI equation started to surface for the enterprise. Retailers talked about integrating AI agents and vendors pitched multiple approaches. Google launched Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a standard for agentic AI commerce, checkout directly through AI mode along with direct offers and interactions to connect brands and shoppers. Google Cloud also unveiled Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, a suite that includes a shopping agent, customer experience agent studio, Vertex AI powered search and food ordering agent.
Other vendors also lined up a parade of AI agent announcements.
The real agentic AI magic will occur when the customer is delighted because an agent just gets you. This vision was outlined by Walmart's Daniel Danker, Executive Vice President of AI Acceleration, Product & Design. Speaking at the ICR Conference, Danker said Walmart isn't worried about being disintermediated. Its partnerships with OpenAI and Google are about growth.
The future is Walmart's agent working with other agents to provide a seamless customer journey. This agentic shopping journey will be practical, friction free and helpful. Walmart is positioning itself as the execution and fulfilment backbone of AI discovery and commerce.
"We understand customers so well that we know that they're probably running out of laundry detergent. It's also recognizing that because they tend to buy a gallon of milk, they're probably in a 4-person household, so they're probably going through laundry detergent at a certain pace. And so, we know the right moment to recommend that laundry detergent. Agentic AI will then just go ahead and send you the laundry detergent before you even run out of it. So that's the promise. We're on a journey toward it. We're not quite there yet, but we're moving fast," explained Danker.
Danker noted that consumers will always love shopping--it's a sport to many--but agentic AI can automate the mundane to improve experiences.
Walmart isn't the only giant thinking through agentic commerce experiences. Albertsons CEO Susan Morris said the company is partnering with the likes of Google, OpenAI and Databricks to ensure "every decision is smarter, every process is more efficient and every interaction is more seamless."
Morris said the biggest bet for agentic AI is digital customer experiences. "Our autonomous shopping assistants are meeting customers where they are and delivering frictionless personalized journeys, keeping our omnichannel customer experience modernized and on trend," said Morris.
Agentic CX will also move beyond retail. Healthcare is a major focus for both vendors and enterprises. Salesforce's Mark Sullivan, President of Salesforce, said at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference that AI agents can become a healthcare concierge. He noted CVS, which recently outlined its engagement vision, and AstraZeneca were Agentforce customers.
CVS Health CEO David Joyner has said the company is focused on "building a simpler, more connected and more affordable health care experience for consumers, health care professionals, and payors." The goal is to be the "front door to healthcare."
Sullivan laid out how agentic AI can deliver care. "Finding care providers is more difficult than ever, and we think this can solve that problem. And then we think of any experience that you have with any procedure you might have, the prep, the post, the follow-up, we all depend on our spouses to do those things. And that's not necessarily the right way to do it. Why? Think of the old medicine where your doctor might call you before, make sure you did all the things that you need to do before your procedure and might follow up after to make sure you took the right medicine and didn't find your way back to the emergency room," explained Sullivan. "We think agents can do that. And we think we can do that better than anything that's ever been rendered before. And we think that keeps people out of the emergency room. We think that changes the health care economy in a meaningful way."
Veeva CFO Brian Van Wagener said the company is rolling out AI agents across its product line to better deliver care. Veeva is a top CRM provider for healthcare and life sciences companies. "We think the combination of those two things, AI in the platform and deep industry-specific agents is going to be transformational for the long term for our customers and is a place where we can bring a lot of value," said Van Wagener.
Michael Farrell, CEO of Resmed, said the theme of an AI-driven health concierge is critical for its core value, which sits at the intersection of health and sleep. "We also have a non-FDA-cleared product because it's just a concierge that I call our digital sleep health concierge. It's called Dawn. Not as in a woman, but as in the sun rising over the horizons that you wake up refreshed. And this is a digital sleep health concierge to help you with questions about exercise, drinking water, balancing your day life to have a better sleep life, stopping caffeine after sort of 5 clock, not having alcohol after 8," said Farrell.
The customer experience in industrial markets is different than retail or healthcare, but the role of agentic AI as an enabler is the same. Caterpillar launched its Cat AI Assistant and primary objective is to make it easier for customers to buy, maintain, manage and operate equipment. Speaking at CES 2026, Caterpillar Chief Digital Officer Ogi Redzic said "for a customer Cat AI Assistant is like a proactive partner. It flags machines that need attention, provides custom insights and makes actionable recommendations."
Under the hood, Cat AI Assistant "is a group of AI agents operating together on top of our digital ecosystem presented as a single, single assistant that's multimodal," said Redzic.
In finance, this agentic-AI-meets-CX theme is also powerful but has more of an employee spin. Bank of New York CEO Robin Vince said the company is focused on AI agents and digital workers that are primarily focused on its employee experience.
Google Cloud said in December that Gemini Enterprise is integrated into Bank of New York's Eliza AI platform. Robin Vince, President and CEO of Bank of New York, said agentic AI transforms the culture.
"We now have an enterprise AI platform, Eliza, that's general intelligence, model-agnostic and it supports this multi-agentic functionality that underpins the digital employees. Then we've put in place the resources to support that to really enable the scaling of it," said Vince. "We've got our own Nvidia hardware and tech, but we've also got the collaborations with Google, OpenAI and others. We're proud that in 2025 alone, we deployed over 130 digital employees, industry-leading multi-agentic AI capabilities. Our digital employees work alongside our people, supporting them with tasks like validating payment details and remediating code vulnerabilities, allowing teams to focus on higher value work and client outcomes."
Citigroup CEO Jane Frazer said the company's AI efforts have transformed operations and now it is focusing on client experiences. "We are shifting our focus to how we can use AI tools and automation to further innovate, reengineer and simplify our processes beyond risk and controls to improve client experience whilst reducing expenses," she said.
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