How are companies using AI agents? Here's a look at five early users

Artificial intelligence agents have emerged as one of the most exciting aspects of generative AI for business because they take chatbots to the next level, performing complex tasks without help from humans.

- Belle Lin

These autonomous AI agents can follow instructions and do things from checking a car rental reservation at the airport to screening potential sales leads.

Leaders, that means the ability to tie the technology to a reduction in the number of hours employees work, or even how many new people they need to hire.

Phu Nguyen, the head of digital workplace at Pure Storage, considers AI agents an obvious boost for each of the data storage firm's employees: "Why should executives be the only people that have a ghost writer that writes their emails or does their slides? Imagine, now, all employees have that power?" he said.

Software companies from Salesforce to ServiceNow, Microsoft and Workday last year all announced their own AI agents, which they say can help businesses be even more hands-off in areas like recruiting employees, contacting potential sales leads, creating marketing content and managing their information technology.

If these AI agents work as promised, they could also provide businesses with the return on investment they have been looking for out of generative AI. According to some corporate technology

Still, more AI agents can mean more problems, especially in cybersecurity, according to market research and IT consulting firm Gartner. By 2028, at least 15% of daily business decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI—up from 0% in 2024, Gartner said. But, also by that time, 25% of enterprise breaches will be tied to AI agent abuse.

Here are five companies that have started integrating AI agents into their products and operations, and what they have learned in the process.

Johnson & Johnson: Drug discovery agents At New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson, AI agents are being used to help the healthcare giant with the chemical synthesis process in drug discovery.