Schuerman sees many organizations designing agents for predictable workflows where they don’t need to reason but can save employees time by taking over routine tasks. Truly succeeding with agentic AI, however, requires building reasoning into agent tasks at the design phase, he says.
“Really anchor what your agents are doing in those business processes, in those workflows, because most of what the enterprise is trying to do wants to run as a pretty deterministic workflow with a prescribed series of steps that you want to get performed in a consistent way every time, with high degrees of predictability, consistency, and audit,” he explains.
Schuerman argues that expectations about how agents should be used have been skewed by early rollouts. Instead, AI should be used to help redefine the business workflows that agents will take over, he says.