This first post in a series we’re calling Unlocking AI ROI. In today’s post we look at some achievable ROI-based goals for your agentic application strategy.
Agentic applications are designed to act autonomously to optimize your processes and ultimately reduce the toil inherent in those processes. With this in mind, we can distill ROI-based outcomes of agentic applications into three key areas: cost savings, efficiency gains, and revenue growth. Here are some potential ROI goals for agentic applications.
1. Bottom-Line Impact: PaaS and Agentic Workflows Drive Cost Control
Agentic apps are ideal for optimizing complex workflows. If done properly, they can significantly lower operational expenses, which makes them appealing from a business perspective. Some outcomes we might expect from agentic applications include:
- Increased team-wide efficiency: By automating repetitive tasks, agentic applications can help organizations to focus workers on higher value tasks such as connecting with customers, and supporting revenue-generating initiatives.
- Reduced employee errors: Agentic apps can help workers avoid common errors by autonomously triaging and resolving customer inquiries, which frees employees to focus on more nuanced tasks that cannot be solved by an AI-driven agent.
- Stronger employee performance: Agentic applications can be a force multiplier for an existing labor force and can boost their productivity by reducing toil. AI-driven agents can accelerate onboarding, enabling new employees to contribute to business goals more quickly.
Running agentic applications on a PaaS can help further maximize these types of efficiencies by giving your developers a secure, self-service experience that scales to their needs. A PaaS provides a consistent development environment, regardless of underlying infrastructure, allowing developers to shift away from manual infrastructure and AI service configuration, and instead focus on building agentic apps that deliver business value.
2. Maintain Competitive Advantage: Increase Operational Agility and Speed-Up Time Market
Agentic applications improve responsiveness to rapidly changing operational needs and meet dynamic user expectations. For example, in times of acute increases in customer demand, agentic applications enable organizations to scale quickly when necessary and scale back down when things normalize. Agentic apps can help to address peak needs dynamically with:
- 24/7 availability: Agentic systems operate without downtime. In times of rapid change or unplanned peaks, organizations can have an always on set of “agents” taking care of business. This can naturally extend current workforce capacity.
- Faster decision-making: AI can be used to analyze data in real-time, reducing latency in business processes and enabling organizations to pivot quickly and address unplanned issues.
- Seamless scalability: Organizations can deploy agentic applications to augment current staffing during peak demand, then retire them when they are no longer needed.
A PaaS solution simplifies scaling up and down by reducing the need for manual infrastructure and AI model scaling. Organizations that incorporate auto-scaling capabilities in their PaaS solution ensure agentic workloads grow with demand, removing the need for platform engineering teams to intervene at off hours.
3. Boost Topline Growth with Differentiated Customer Experiences
Beyond cost savings and efficiency, agentic applications can drive new revenue streams by helping you attract, retain and delight your customers with differentiated experiences. The ability to ask an agentic application in natural language, means that end users don’t have to spend time tracking down the appropriate back-office system to resolve their issue; an agent will figure that out for them so they get to resolution more quickly. And because the agentic application has autonomy to query systems and analyze inputs in near real-time, it can also provide recommendations and that potentially generate revenue, if not loyalty, from those interactions. Organizations can grow topline revenue using agent apps with:
- Personalized customer experiences: AI-powered analysis and access to supporting systems like ecommerce applications, third party shipping systems as well as ordering systems can help agents to identify and cross-sell services or products to customers.
- Novel AI-driven services: Businesses can also grow topline revenue by introducing new, AI-powered products, such as autonomous financial advisors. In addition, organizations can launch these new revenue streams without having to reskill current employees.
These topline growth opportunities should be supported by an opinionated platform with repeatable patterns and built-in security for agents to effectively create efficiency and expand revenue opportunities.
In the Age of Agentic AI, PaaS is a Strategic Imperative
Organizations are under increasing pressure to deliver value faster, smarter, and at scale. Agentic applications can offer powerful value to the enterprise. Agents can drive better bottom-line efficiency by automating routine tasks, leading to significant cost reductions. Agentic applications can also increase operational agility and speed up time to market, helping businesses stay ahead in highly competitive environments. Finally, agentic applications can boost topline growth by enabling teams to build differentiated customer experiences. However, without a platform, the manual overhead of managing and monitoring agentic applications can quickly erode any hard-won gains.
A PaaS solution can reduce time to agentic value by offering turnkey AI-ready environments so that development teams can focus on differentiating application innovation rather than infrastructure-related tasks.
Unlocking AI ROI with Faster and Less Expensive Iteration
Tanzu Platform is an AI-ready, Platform as a Service (PaaS) that helps organizations deliver agentic applications more quickly by freeing developers from the burden of managing complex AI infrastructure and models. Tanzu Platform can help organizations achieve their agentic application ROI by helping them more efficiently develop, operate and optimize agentic applications.
This recent video from Adib Saikali, Distinguished Engineer, Tanzu Division, Broadcom illustrates how organizations should think about getting to AI ROI through continuous and less expensive AI application iteration.
Also be sure to check out Cloud Foundry Weekly vlog series which has multiple shows dedicated to AI application delivery.
Or for those who are looking to build new AI skills, please consider attending our Cloud Foundry Day Platform Engineering Skills for GenAI and Agentic Training Workshop on May 13th being held on the VMware Campus in Palo Alto.
