Agentic AI for Business

A Leader's Guide to Deploying AI That Acts

De: Shane Larson

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Agentic AI for Business: A Leader's Guide to Deploying AI That Acts

The AI conversation has moved on. Chatbots were the appetizer. The main course is agentic AI — systems that don't just answer questions but take autonomous action, use tools, reason through multi-step problems, and get real work done.

Every major AI vendor is now selling "agentic AI" products. Most of them aren't actually agentic. And the leaders making million-dollar investment decisions about these products have no framework for telling the difference.

This book fixes that.

Shane Larson — a domain manager for integration engineering at a major financial institution, and founder of Cortex Agent — cuts through the marketing fog to explain what makes AI truly agentic, where it creates genuine business value, and how to deploy it without losing control.

What you'll learn:

• The three capabilities that make an AI system genuinely agentic — and a five-question test to expose rebranded chatbots
• The five-layer agentic AI stack and how each layer maps to build-vs-buy decisions
• A practical framework for identifying high-value use cases in your organization
• Six real-world case studies showing what agentic deployment actually looks like — including the failures
• The three-phase deployment model: shadow mode, supervised mode, autonomous mode
• How to design guardrails that prevent catastrophic failures without crippling agent effectiveness
• What happens when agents go wrong — failure modes, incident response, and kill switches
• The honest truth about how agentic AI changes roles, eliminates jobs, and requires organizational transformation
• Six metrics that actually measure agentic AI performance (hint: traditional AI metrics miss the point)

This book is for you if:

• You're a CIO, CTO, or VP making investment decisions about agentic AI
• You're a business leader whose function is being targeted for agentic automation
• You're a transformation officer navigating AI strategy
• You're a consultant helping clients evaluate agentic AI vendors
• You've read the hype and want the practical reality from someone who builds these systems

This book is NOT for you if:

• You want a technical manual for building AI agents (this is a business strategy book)
• You want breathless optimism about AI changing everything (this book is anti-hype by design)
• You want a 30-page pamphlet with surface-level advice (this is a comprehensive, 37,000+ word guide)

Written by someone who builds agentic AI systems for enterprise environments, not someone who writes about them from a distance. No jargon. No hype. Just the practical frameworks and honest assessments you need to get agentic AI right.