Agentic AI is, in the opinion of McKinsey, the way to ‘break out of the gen AI paradox.’ Nearly four in five companies are using generative AI, according to the consultancy giant’s research, but comparatively few are getting any bottom-line value from it.
The answer to the question of value, therefore, may be in orchestration. As a CIO.com article from July postulates, some experts see the orchestration function as ‘the point when agents become agentic.’
This is where BMC sees an opportunity with its Control-M platform, which enables organisations to automate the scheduling and processing of business workflows across various platforms and applications from a single point of control. Last month BMC was named as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for service orchestration and automation platforms.
BMC sees Control-M, in the words of director of solutions marketing Basil Faruqui, as the ‘orchestrator of orchestrators’, connecting multiple tools together. Faruqui predicts that, potentially within 12 months to two years, this orchestration will move from applications and APIs to agents.
Salesforce, for example, has Agentforce, which it calls a ‘digital labour platform’, enabling companies visibility and control in scaling AI agents; and for Faruqui, that is where the puck is going. “Whether it’s a data warehouse, whether it’s a CRM like Salesforce or SAP, all of these things will be automating their functions using agentic AI,” he says. “[The orchestrator’s role] is going to change; it’s going to be automating and connecting agents across systems.
“That’s really where we see our future in this ‘agent economy’, so to speak,” adds Faruqui. “We see Control-M playing the role of, really, being the orchestrator of agents across systems.”
Faruqui notes a recent meeting with the CTO of a major healthcare organisation, processing north of $10 billion each month in claims, in which they said initial testing of gen AI and LLMs was ‘transformative’. Applying gen AI to claims processing could cut down time of operations in ‘orders of magnitude.’ But as Faruqui puts it, technology for an enterprise is only producing value once it’s running in production – and operational and governance challenges remain a principal barrier. Orchestration therefore helps bridge the gap.
Another positive Faruqui, who is speaking at AI & Big Data Expo Europe later this month, notes is the breadth and depth of investment in this space. “[For] sponsorship, a lot of these projects are not at the CIO or CTO level. It’s really coming from the board,” he says. “We’re actually seeing, in some cases, that companies are starting to report on the progress of their AI initiatives in their letter to the shareholders.
“This is going to move fast, which means that, from the vendor side we have to be ready, not in three years, [but] six months,” says Faruqui. “And we in BMC, we are working through a very bold vision where we see this agent economy really taking off; and really, orchestration is the vehicle for business outcomes.”
Watch the full conversation with Basil:
Basil Faruqui is speaking at the AI & Big Data Expo Europe, in Amsterdam on September 24-25, on the panel session ‘Building Robust Pipelines-Best Practices for Scalability and Efficiency’. Register your place today.
