Are you hearing about AI agents everywhere right now? Whether it's their presence in the software you use daily, special purpose or task “agents”, or customer service “agents”, it's safe to say they are the topic 'du jour'.

In this week’s episode, we segment this confusing landscape and cut through the hype to help you make more sense of it all.

After weeks of interviewing guests across different corners of the agentic AI world, we realised the market has become genuinely bewildering, even for us! Vendors are slapping the word "agent" on almost anything, and it's getting harder to tell what's substantive and what's marketing.

Listen in to hear about the simple framework we've developed to bring clarity to the whole ecosystem. It maps out the key choices facing any business considering agents, the questions you should be asking, and where the real risks are quietly hiding.

Regardless of whether your organisation is ready to start experimenting with agents or not, this episode will help you take the first steps when you are ready. As they say, when you can see something clearly, your decisions become easier.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• The four very different ways to bring agents into your organisation — and why the question isn't "which is best?"
• Why some of the SaaS tools you already pay for might quietly be putting you in a "hostage situation"
• What a team of Harvard, MIT and Stanford researchers just uncovered about one of the most hyped agent platforms on the market
• The layer of the agent ecosystem where the real cyber security risks live
• Four sharp questions to ask any vendor before letting their agent anywhere near your data and systems

Enjoy this practical and jargon-light guide to a topic that isn't going away anytime soon.

Useful Links

• McKinsey / Quantum Black report: Seizing the agentic AI advantage
• Capgemini report - ‘Rise of Agentic AI’
• MIT Sloan & BCG Report - Leading in the age of AI Agents (useful for Governance and structuring once you’ve made agentic decisions)

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What does it actually mean to have a colleague who never sleeps, never calls in sick, and can hold thousands of conversations at once? Not in theory but right now, in real organisations?

Our guest this week is Patrick Forth, an Group Executive Director at FutureSecure AI, a company that builds what they call AI co-workers: sophisticated agentic systems that sit on org charts, have names and personas, and are managed much like human employees.

Patrick shares what some of the AI co-workers they’ve built so far actually do in enterprises today and what it takes to get them working inside organisations.

In this episode you'll hear:

• About the AI co-worker managing thousands of scheduling conversations on WhatsApp
• Why their AI co-workers focus on complex, high-return use cases rather than simple automation
• Patrick's take on the job loss debate
• How one organisation puts humans and AI co-workers on the same org chart just in different colours, and
• Whether AI co-workers should be treated like software or like colleagues.

If you want a glimpse into the possible future of your workplace and colleagues then enjoy this episode with someone who’s at the coalface helping companies choose use cases and deploying AI co-workers right now

Useful Links

FutureSecure AI website

Patrick Forth on LinkedIn

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AI shopping agents aren't just on the horizon, they're here, already transacting, and already raising some important questions.

In this episode, we speak with Katja Forbes an award winning customer experience futurist, business strategist, and keynote speaker recognised for her insights into the intersection of AI, design, and human behaviour. She is also the author of Machine Customers: The Evolution Has Begun, a book about what happens when your best customer is no longer human.

In this fascinating conversation we cover everything from what's already happening with agentic commerce right now, to an incredible story out of China that reveals just how fast consumer behaviour can be reshaped at massive scale.

In this episode you'll hear:

• Why the shopping agents built by the retailers you already use may not be working in your interest

• What it means that AI agents now have access to their own credit cards and the guardrails (or lack thereof) around them

• How some of the world’s largest businesses are already using AI to handle a significant share of their procurement

• The practical steps marketers and business owners should be taking right now, before agentic commerce becomes the norm, and . . .

• Why your website could become largely irrelevant and what that means for how you show up to both humans and machines.

Katja also shares a candid look at the environmental and ethical questions we need to be asking as frictionless purchasing increasingly becomes a reality.

This conversation is set to change how you think about your next online purchase and, if you’re in marketing or procurement or e-commerce, then this is one you simply cannot miss.

Enjoy this episode with the passionate and ahead-of-the-curve, Katja Forbes.

Useful Links

Katja Forbes website

Katja Forbes on LinkedIn

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.