Over the past year, generative AI has moved from a curiosity to a C-suite priority. Most leaders have experimented with it, deploying AI-powered tools to summarize meetings, draft emails, or serve as enhanced chatbots. This has been an important first act in understanding the technology’s potential. But it has also led to a critical question now echoing in boardrooms: “Where is the transformative ROI?”
The answer lies in moving beyond AI as a passive assistant and embracing it as an active partner for your team. The real value isn’t just in answering questions faster; it’s in empowering AI to take action. This is the dawn of the AI “agent”—a system designed not just to provide information, but to execute multi-step tasks across multiple business systems. While a chatbot can tell an employee your company’s travel policy, an AI agent can help that employee book a flight and hotel that comply with it, file the expense pre-approval, and add the trip to their calendar.
This is the leap from AI as a tool to AI as a force multiplier for your employees. Tools like Google Agentspace are freeing them from repetitive, low-value work to focus on what humans do best: strategy, creativity, and building customer relationships. For leaders, the path to generating real pipeline and profit from AI is through identifying the business problems that agents are uniquely positioned to solve.
Where AI agents create immediate value
The power of AI agents is quickly becoming evident across industries. A recent Google Cloud announcement, for example, showcased over 600 real-world generative AI applications from leading organizations, many of them demonstrating agents in action. Several SADA customers were notably featured, highlighting their pioneering work and the significant business outcomes achieved. These examples reinforce the profound impact of evolving beyond basic AI tools to intelligent, task-executing agents. Based on dozens of agent-based projects we’re engaged in, three critical use cases stand out as clear starting points for any enterprise:
1. Eradicating the internal integration backlog
Every business leader knows the pain of the innovation drag caused by a backlogged IT department. A great idea from the marketing team to connect customer data to a sales application can take months—or even years—to be implemented. This friction slows down growth. AI agents can act as “digital plumbers,” empowering your teams by giving them the ability to connect systems and move data securely and automatically. This doesn’t just apply to massive projects; it’s about giving a sales operations leader the power to build an agent that ensures every new sale in their CRM automatically creates a corresponding project record in the financial system, freeing both teams from manual data entry.
2. Automating the “long tail” of repetitive work
Inside every department lies a “long tail” of repetitive, manual tasks. These processes are too small and specific to ever justify a dedicated software purchase, but they cumulatively consume thousands of hours of your best talent’s time. Think of a marketing manager who manually creates a new campaign folder with dozens of templated documents, or a finance clerk who spends hours each week reconciling data between two different spreadsheets. These are perfect tasks for an AI agent. By building a digital assistant to handle these unique internal processes, you unlock a massive, hidden well of productivity and allow your people to focus on work that truly drives the business forward.
3. Unlocking your siloed institutional knowledge
Your company’s most valuable intelligence—decades of case studies, complex HR policies, dense security logs, competitive research—is likely scattered across dozens of disconnected systems. An agent can be given secure access to all these unstructured sources, acting as a powerful search and synthesis tool for your employees. A junior salesperson can ask, “Give me three examples of our work in the healthcare sector for a company of this size and summarize the key business outcomes,” and receive a synthesized answer with links to the source documents in seconds. This doesn’t just make them faster; it makes them smarter, more effective, and more data-driven in every client interaction.
The potential for AI agents is immense, and understanding how to strategically implement them is key to maximizing their impact. For an even deeper dive into these powerful tools and how to apply them in your organization, be sure to check out The AI agent handbook.
How to foster an agent-ready culture
Knowing where to apply agents is only half the battle. Success depends on fostering a culture that embraces this new way of working.
First, start with low-risk, high-impact problems.
Instead of attempting a massive, complex overhaul, identify a single, frustrating, repetitive task within one department and build a pilot agent for it. An internal HR policy bot is a perfect example. It’s a safe environment to prove the value and build comfort with the technology.
Second, empower your internal champions.
Within your organization, there are curious, tech-savvy employees who are excited by this shift. Give them the license and the safe space to experiment. They will often identify the most valuable use cases for agents because they are closest to the friction in their daily work.
Finally, focus every project on augmentation.
The goal of every agent initiative should be explicitly defined by the human benefit: “What tedious task are we removing so this person can focus on more strategic challenges?” By framing AI as a partner in success, you build trust and excitement, turning apprehension into adoption.
The organizations that thrive in the coming years will be those that see AI not as a replacement for their people but as a powerful tool to unleash their true potential. The competitive advantage lies in building a human-machine partnership where digital agents handle routine tasks, freeing your team to focus on the creative and strategic challenges that will define the future of your business.
Ready to unlock the full potential of your team with AI and see a clear path to ROI?
Join SADA and Google Cloud for Ground School 2025, a complimentary full-day digital event designed to demystify the hype around artificial intelligence and provide practical, production-ready blueprints for successful AI solutions. Learn from real-world implementation stories, gain actionable insights on data readiness and cloud security, and discover a clear roadmap to achieving tangible business outcomes with AI on Google Cloud.
