Like many companies these days, cybersecurity firm Armis is keeping a close eye on agentic AI, one of the hottest areas in tech over the past few months. Vendors say tools that rely on the technology can perform more complex workplace tasks with little human intervention, thereby saving businesses on labor costs.
But agentic technology is also rapidly evolving, making corporate tech leaders unsure about which tools are best and whether better products will come along later. Costs can also balloon, particularly for those that get carried away by all the sales pitches and internal pressure to adopt a large number of agentic AI products.
“I fully expect to have approximately eight to 10 agentic solutions by the end of April—and hopefully not increase beyond that,” says Curtis Simpson, chief information security officer at Armis.
It’s a balancing act that many companies are facing. A quarter of employers will try out agentic AI this year, a figure that will swell to 50% by 2027, according to consulting firm Deloitte.
Simpson plans a hybrid approach in which he tries one AI agent from a large provider—he says one option is Amazon Q, an agentic assistant that can be used by software developers, customer support employees, supply chain analysts, and other specialized capabilities. He also foresees using narrower agentic products, like Salesforce’s Agentforce, which is mainly for sales teams. As the technologies evolve and Armis gets a better sense of what’s best for the business, that mix will change.
“We can drop more and more of those agents as we progress through this effort,” says Simpson.
Cloud-based security company Netskope is also trying to focus on agentic technologies. Mike Anderson, chief digital and information officer, says his team takes at least two meetings each week with existing partners and outside vendors to closely monitor the space. “Everything we’re doing is short-term commitments because the space is evolving so quickly,” says Anderson.
Most of the AI agents Netskope has adopted have been built into workplace communications tool Slack, including a bot that can handle IT help desk requests and another from Crayon, a software company that monitors real-time competitor pricing to ensure Netskope is pricing its products competitively within the market. But workers can face a flurry of messages from the different bots in Slack, adding unnecessary complexity.
Anderson wants to create a Netskope bot that can ingest all employee-to-agentic conversations with the IT help desk, Crayon, and others, so that the new company bot can be trained to retrieve information from the other bots supplied by outside vendors. “I need the bot to rule the bots,” says Anderson.
Kathy Kay, chief information officer of insurance company Principal Financial, who takes pitches from many vendors of agentic AI tools, says she isn’t star struck by the latest industry buzzword. “I keep going back to, ‘How do we make humans superhuman?'” asks Kay.
Principal Financial’s view is that agentic AI, copilots, and other niche forms of AI, are all tools designed to help employees work more effectively. What Kay still has to figure out is which agentic AI offerings will deliver the best business outcomes, while also taking into consideration other factors like speed, ease of integration, and cost.
“I do envision we will have more agents in production throughout this year,” says Kay.
Kim Anstett, the CIO at Trellix, says she met with every department at the cybersecurity provider to discuss possible uses for AI agents and came up with a list of over 100. While internal excitement about agentic AI is high, and Anstett is beginning a few pilots of the technology, she also doesn’t foresee buying agentic products from every vendor Trellix works with today.
“From a strategy perspective, initially we will limit the number of add ons we purchase,” says Anstett. “We’re looking at it from a cost perspective.”
Patrick Richards, CIO of fleet management software provider Motive, says half of his time these days is dedicated to meeting with AI vendors, including about internal uses of agentic AI. He prefers narrower agentic applications, meaning he wants to give these tools limited autonomy so that he can avoid acting on hallucinations, or outputs that are inaccurate or misleading.
Richards also intends to work with multiple vendors, which he acknowledges comes with more controls needed to manage data privacy and security. But it also gives Motive greater leverage when it comes to pricing.
“Do I want to enter into a new world where I have vendor lock with one AI platform, and then they slowly raise the price until I’m a frog in hot water and I’m boiling?” Richards asks. By casting a wide net, Richards believes he can “shop for the best agent provider for the actual business problem I’m trying to solve.”
John Kell
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NEWS PACKETS
AI jobs are in high demand. The number of job listings with terms related to generative AI in the description soared 170% year over year in January, CIO Dive reports, citing an analysis from employment website Indeed. Management consulting roles were the most in demand. Others postings seeking generative AI skills include machine learning engineers, software architects, and data scientists. Meanwhile, CNN reports that job postings in AI fields have increased 68% in the U.S. since the end of 2022, while overall job listings have dropped 17% in the same period, citing data from AIMaps, a program that aims to track the creation of AI jobs.
Anthropic closes new funding at $61.5 billion valuation. Claude chatbot developer Anthropic has closed a $3.5 billion investment, Bloomberg reports. The AI startup’s annual revenue run rate was about $1 billion late last year, and is up 30% so far this year. The fresh funding will help Anthropic, whose investors include Amazon and Alphabet’s Google, as it competes against OpenAI, which is reportedly in talks for its own funding at a valuation as high as $300 billion.
Microsoft to close Skype. Video-calling service Skype will shut down in May while, its owner, Microsoft, focuses on Teams, its core videoconferencing and team collaboration software. While Microsoft paid $8.5 billion for Skype in 2011, in recent years, it has prioritized Teams over Skype, and as the Associated Press reports, closing the latter reflects an effort to streamline its main communications app amid heightened competition from rivals including Slack and Zoom. In a sign of what’s next, the Wall Street Journal reports about a new 3D video communications platform that’s under development at Google and HP with the intention of making virtual calls more like an in-person conversation.
ADOPTION CURVE
AI readiness gap persists between executives and their employees. While 72% of business leaders say they are “very” or “somewhat” confident about their AI skills, only 29% believe their employees are very skilled in using AI tools, according to a survey of 1,000 senior executives at U.S. companies with over $500 million in revenue.
Infosys, the India-based IT service company that commissioned the survey, says it’s particularly troublesome given that 85% of respondents also say that technology, including AI, influences their employees’ decision making. What’s holding businesses back, according to Infosys chief technology officer Rafee Tarafdar, is that many haven’t yet developed persona-specific training that’s tailored for each department. But even the online training courses and educational webcast sessions can only go so far.
“After that, they should be given the opportunity to apply and practice it, because that’s how they’ll become better,” says Tarafdar.
JOBS RADAR
Hiring:
- Moët Hennessy is seeking a senior director of infrastructure and technology operations, based in New York City. Posted salary range: $187K-$234K/year.
- Starkey Hearing is seeking a SVP of IT, based in Eden Prairie, Minn. Posted salary range: $249K-$326.7K/year.
- PepsiCo is seeking a CTO director, based in Plano, Tex., Posted salary range: $125.9K-$249.9K/year.
- Measures for Justice is seeking a director of IT and DevOps, based in Rochester, N.Y. Posted salary: $173.9K/year.
Hired:
- Commvault named Ha Hoang as CIO, focusing on advancing cloud, security, and AI technology initiatives and operations. Before joining the data management company, Hoang was group vice president of cloud engineering and infrastructure at HR management software provider UKG and also held leadership roles at McKinsey and Wipro.
- CoreWeave appointed Jim Higgins as chief information security officer, joining the cloud computing provider to oversee security strategy, governance, and infrastructure protection. Most recently, he was CISO for Snap, the parent company of messaging app Snapchat, and also served as CISO at financial services company Block.
- Books-A-Million has promoted Brandon Waters to CIO after he initially joined the bookstore chain in June 2024 as SVP of IT. Previously, Waters was VP of IT at Milo’s Tea Company and before that, spent over 15 years in managerial and programmer roles at Books-A-Million.
- SWARM Engineering announced Joe Intrakamhang as CTO, joining the software provider after most recently serving as head of cost optimization and data management at Alphabet’s Verily division, which researches life sciences. Intrakamhang also previously served as a head of data science procurement at Google.
- Chemify announced Michael Bell as CTO, joining the Scotland-based chemical science company after serving as SVP of digital at Lucid Motors and previously as CTO at Rivian Automotive. Bell also worked at Apple for over 15 years, leading multiple divisions as a VP. He was also a VP for more than five years at Intel.
- Wugen named Jim Faulkner as CTO, initially on an interim basis, to help the clinical-stage biotechnology company as it launches a Phase 2 trial for treatments of blood cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Faulkner has served as a consultant advising gene and cell therapy development and on several boards, including the London-based Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult.
- Grid Dynamics promoted Eugene Steinberg to CTO, succeeding Rajeev Sharma, who will remain with the IT consulting company as managing partner of the Asia-Pacific region. Steinberg was a founding engineer at Grid Dynamics and most recently served as distinguished technical fellow. The leadership changes will go into effect on April 1.
- Frontier Scientific Solutions appointed Keith Parent as CTO, joining the provider of temperature-controlled storage and services sold to the life sciences industry as new drug supply chain regulations go into full effect. Previously, Parent was the founder and CEO of Court Square Group, an IT solutions provider for life sciences.