From Autonomated to the Automated Enterprise: Agentic AI

Tech changes everything, the pace is relentless, the impact, once doubling every two years, now it seismic, exponential in nature.

We had the Agile Organisation.

Resilient, Responsive, Learning, Resourceful, Adaptative etc etc

Now we've been around the idea of Orgs having degrees of Agility, call it Business or Enterprise Agility, focusing on Reducing Time to Market, Speed, Scale etc fuelled by Scaled Lean Agile., Cloud, repeatable assets, Platforms etc

Now were approaching the Autonomous Enterprise.

Its the same exponeital pattern from Cloud, Lean, Agile, DevOps...or DevOps, BizOps, AIOps, NoOps etc

With the power of the elastic autoscaling, self detecting - self healing cloud infrastructure using Agentic AI ontop of RPA, NLP, ML ,the Bots can run/exploit as well as grow/explore the business.

Agentic AI

Is the latest class of artificial intelligence systems that utilises sophisticated reasoning to perceive its operating environment, plan iteratively to solve complex problems autonomously to achieve specific outcomes.

Making DevOps Old Skool

This is different to Autonomation - a form of automation but still requiring a human touch. DevOps CICD pipelines for example, each tool is joined using APIs or web hooks, then needs a code snippet to trigger the "autonomation" by a human with hands on a keyboard, by NLP or via an Amazon button or remote smart phone/tablet.

This type of automation implements some supervisory functions like QA/QC/QM rather than production functions as it ships coe to prod.

Building in more Value, more Flow, More Quality

Pulling the Andon Cord at Toyota, stops the line, everyone huddles and solves the issue then and there, lowering down the line costs to correct, fixing closest to the point of the problem at root cause, applying the four principles:

1. detect the abnormality

2. stop

3. fix or correct the immediate condition

4. investigate the root cause and install a countermeasure

Like Lean, Like Agile, DevOps, Autonomation and Automation aims to:

• prevent the production of defective products,

• eliminate the need for speculative (over)production of defect-replacements,

• focus attention on understanding the problems,

• ensure the problems do not recur.

  
  

  I wont go into Jidoka, Shingo Shendo or other Lean Terms, as I kow people hate them, get confused, but this is the origins of all of this just-in-time systems thinking.

Automation

Automation is the application of technology, programs, robotics, or processes to achieve outcomes with minimal human input. It aims to improve efficiency, reliability, and speed of tasks that were previously performed by humans

When we make a Leap/shift from Intelligent Autonomation i.e. RPA, NLP, ML to Agentic AI that reasons, thinks, and acts to do things befoire we know thye happen, a bit like putting slef healing, self detecting agents on nodes, which can takedown failing isntances and spin up a new one without any downtime and before the users know their a P1/Break Fix needed.

Is this real?

Well think of Car Factories and the Auto Industry, they have been doing this for years.

Think Amazon Shops with Facial Recognition, Autopayment and Automated Stock Replenishment - the embodyment of all things LeanOps. No handoff the humans to do the end of day accounting/reconciliation of the till/s, no sending cash up air tubes to the Safe, its all done electronically in seconds without human intervention, even logistical robots that can refill items on shelves in real time.

Where moving from human labour, to autonomised to now Agentic Self Learning, Self Guided, Self Doing Agentic AI and Workplaces anad Systems of Work.

This is operationalising Agility in its highest sense.

The Impact - Human Robot now Agentic Teams

We've all seen the decline of the high Street for Drop Shipping, who wants to be ignored by the salespeople, or get bad CS from them, when you can ignore it all from the leisure of your home/pool/backyard etc etc.

We've seen brick and mortor go "omnichannel" or "cyberphigital", ( physical and online) through digital commerce and digital marketing/e marketing.

Bots have been used in Aged Care in Japan for sometime, not only to lift, but to companion people.

Cognitive Overload, Data, Comms, Instructions over IM, so much of it it gives you a migraine. Let the bots do it for you, use them as aids, to your super powers of thinking creatively, dynamically and get some of your capacity back for sports and pleasure, the family, instead of bing drained. its a New New Way of Working. Let its suggest schedules using prompt enginerering to build your personal assistant, your personal PA.

Agenteic and Strategic AI, as well as Generative AI cna help with pretty much everything these days, you jsut have to master it to become a power user and work out how bst ointergrte it into yore work.

Marketing Automatiop started all of this, followed by Professional Services Automation, but automation is everywhere, now making the once time consuming, super hard ,, if not impossible individual tasks now passible in seconds and minutes, boosting your peersonal and company productivity, efficiency and effectiveness

Its here, emrace it, dont fight it.