Digital enablement specialist Ovations Technologies has built on its in-house capacity to go to market with a unique and comprehensive Agentic AI enablement service.
It will include components such as advisory, definition of use cases, addressing governance and data requirements, and also provide the technology and human capabilities to implement and scale Agentic AI projects.
Nicolas Field, Associate Director and Management Consultant at Ovations Technologies, says that while Agentic AI was embedded in some of the company’s solutions in the past, it has now become a standalone value proposition to meet growing demand in the market.
Field says: “Agentic AI will become part of day-to-day work in most organisations. The question now is how we capacitate them to deploy it safely and at scale so they can achieve ROI - which has not been the case so far.”
Resonating with the market
“When Agentic AI became known to the market and people started understanding more about what it could do, it resonated with a significant portion of the market because of the impact it can have,” he says.
Field explains that Agentic AI is the evolution of other forms of AI: “We've got generative AI, which is the ChatGPT type AI technology that everybody is quite accustomed to. It's able to create outcomes such as pictures and text. You've also got the more traditional AI, with machine learning that's able to predict outcomes based on certain inputs and patterns that it's learned. There are also AI assistants that are able to chat, react and give us answers. What's different with Agentic AI is that it actually starts doing work, often combining a lot of the technology that's already there, and is then able to execute actions and activities without a huge amount of input.”
Almost in the same way humans do, Agentic AI reacts to a user request, thinks about how to solve the problem, and then uses the various tools available to execute on the task. These might be documents, data models, or even other agents, Field says.
Overcoming hurdles for exceptional results
Field says that Agentic AI is in its early adoption phase, with many organisations facing challenges in harnessing and scaling it.
“There are multiple challenges around the governance of AI, agents and data, which is preventing the widespread deployment of AI agents,” he says. “Many companies are running into the issue of not having put the right guardrails in place. In addition, the data required is not necessarily available and properly protected. Therefore, they get stuck in the POC or MVP process. They don't know how to expand the use of Agentic AI because they don't have those governance mechanisms in place or they don't have the data integrity in place and that then limits the immediate return on investment.”
“These challenges will be overcome as the technology matures and governance mechanisms become a standard part of Agentic AI processes. IBM already has governance built in which makes it a good fit for many clients handling sensitive data, such as financial institutions,” Field says.
“IBM deployed Agentic AI internally within their shared services space and saw significant gains: a 75% improvement in productivity, 50% reduction in IT ticket volumes, and an 83% improvement in time to resolve sales queries,” he says. “Achieving productivity gains of 30% to 50% is exceptionally good when one implements automation and new technology, but to achieve anything beyond that is unheard of.”
Agentic AI enablement
Ovations’ new Agentic AI enablement service draws on the company’s partnerships with IBM and Atlassian, as well as its extensive in-house capabilities.
Field says: “We have close connections with IBM and Atlassian, with over 25 years’ experience in developing automation solutions, implementing them and keeping them going.”
Field says: “Atlassian has AI capability, which is very much focused on the Atlassian product suite and Jira with Rovo GenAI. IBM watsonx Orchestrate, specifically created for enterprises, is quite agnostic in terms of what it can manage, so it is not restricted to the IBM suite. Most large software houses have their own Agentic AI capabilities, and IBM watsonx Orchestrate can sit on top and manage those agents as a larger Agentic AI environment."
He adds: “IBM watsonx Orchestrate brings the safety component with it from a governance perspective, with agent evaluators and production monitoring of agents post-implementation to ensure those agents are actually executing and carrying out the work as they've been instructed to do. It also has a data lake house capability that can take unstructured data and make it available and user-friendly for AI. IBM has created pre-built skills - AI agents that have already been pre-built for many of the mainstream software solutions out there to reduce the time to value.”
Field notes: “What we're seeing in the market is organisations are more successful when they bring in agents that have already been tested and use a platform that has governance capabilities as well as data management capabilities to make it happen.”
Ovations helps clients get started on a successful Agentic AI journey by partnering with IBM to offer free POCs to customers.
“Our approach is to create a client engineering capability within Ovations so that we can run with these POCs ourselves, using IBM technology as the platform. From a client perspective, it's a good way of testing and understanding the capabilities of Agentic AI in a safe and controlled manner, partnering with teams that have been there, done that, and understand the complexities.”
Ovations has also started scaling up its own agentic AI capability. Field says: “We have a large number of developers that have got the requisite skills and IBM badges to help deploy the IBM watsonx Orchestrate within our client systems. We've also gone through the process of developing agentic AI ourselves, and we have a placement division and have trained eight young resources with new Agentic AI skill sets that are going to be in demand. Our plan is to be ahead of the curve - we want to be the go-to partner for IBM and Atlassian-enabled Agentic AI.”
At Ovations, we believe transformation is a journey, not a destination. Discover how our expertise and partnerships can help your business thrive. Visit OvationsGroup.com to explore our solutions and start the conversation.
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