Tim Banting
As copilots hit a “trust wall,” enterprise buyers are shifting attention from AI that recommends work to AI that can finish work.
Early copilots proved useful for transcription, summaries, sentiment, and next-best actions – but those features are now table stakes.
In this Agentic AI Buyer’s Guide, we explore everything you need to know.
What Agentic AI changes for buyers
“Agentic AI isn’t just ‘a better copilot’.”
It’s a different operating model: you set a goal, the agent plans steps, takes actions across systems, and completes a workflow – more like a self-driving car than Google Maps.
That shift raises the stakes on accountability. The Air Canada chatbot case is a clear warning: if AI makes a faulty recommendation, the business – not the model – owns the outcome.
For buying committees, this means agentic initiatives must be evaluated like automation and risk programs, not productivity add-ons.
Buyer advice: make reliability measurable
For agentic AI, the headline KPI isn’t “quality of output.” It’s workflow completion reliability: how often tasks finish correctly without humans babysitting.
Buyers should demand auditable evidence of: (1) task success rates, (2) exception handling, (3) access controls and policy enforcement, and (4) end-to-end observability – showing exactly which data sources and policies drove each decision.
This is also where governance expands: risk, compliance, and legal teams will increasingly sit inside the buying center, because hallucinations and automated actions translate directly into business risk.
Vendor advice: win on observability and compliance posture
Vendors chasing agentic leadership should stop leading with “smarter.” Lead with provable. Differentiation will come from embedded observability (source tracing, decision logs, and explainable action chains), plus clear alignment to regulatory regimes such as the EU AI Act.
In short: the winners will be those who can complete workflows across systems of record – and prove it with data.
Conclusion
Agentic AI can unlock real automation, but only if enterprises treat it as a governed execution layer, not a shiny assistant.
Buyers should prioritize measurable reliability and auditability; vendors should compete on transparency, compliance readiness, and operational proof.
The market is moving fast – but trust, observability, and governance will decide who scales safely.
To further explore the compliance dynamics in the transition from copilots to agentic – dive into my latest interview with CX Today: ‘Agentic AI Observability: Why Copilots Are Stalling and Agents Are Taking Over’
