“Four Key Considerations for Enterprises to Ensure Effective Agents”

The realm of Agentic AI is expanding rapidly as businesses tap into its potential. However, constructing an AI agent workflow can be fraught with challenges.

May Habib, the co-founder and CEO of the comprehensive AI platform Writer, suggests four key considerations for businesses contemplating autonomous AI and the automated workflows facilitated by AI agents.

“Without focusing on the capabilities that empower you to achieve self-sufficiency, you’ll never scale a generative AI program,” Habib advises.

According to Habib, businesses should consider the following four aspects when exploring AI workflows that can add value:

1. Comprehend your use cases and the vital business logic linked to them
2. Understand your data and ensure it remains relevant to your business cases
3. Identify the team members capable of building these use cases
4. Manage your organization’s capacity to adapt to change

Master your process and establish a pipeline

Habib believes that many businesses don’t need an AI to guide their growth. Instead, they need AI to streamline existing work and support current processes, provided they understand what these processes are.

“Don’t overlook the complexity of the workflow nodes and don’t get carried away with the hype of agentic until you’ve perfected that workflow. Otherwise, you’re just circulating inaccurate information or poor system outputs,” Habib warns.

While good data is essential for business processes, Habib also recommends building a data pipeline to bring in fresh data relevant to specific business use cases.

Equally important is knowing who in the organization can build the AI applications and who best understands the workflows involved in the use cases. Habib emphasizes that AI doesn’t dictate processes; businesses do. All these factors contribute to the fourth principle of effective generative AI: understanding the organization’s capacity for change and how the actual users can derive value from the technology.

Visualizing automated AI workflows

Writer has developed AI agents and other applications on its comprehensive AI platform. This includes the Palmyra family of models, specifically designed for businesses. Its latest model, Palmyra X 004, excels in function calling and workflow execution, aiding in the construction of AI agents. Its AI models have also been highly successful in healthcare and finance use cases. Writer also provides RAG frameworks for businesses.

Despite her personal aversion to the term ‘agents’ due to its varied meanings, Habib envisions agentic AI as “AI that can respond to a command, use Writer apps, interact with each other, and utilize third-party applications.”

Writer’s agentic AI workflow framework relies on a series of Writer apps integrated into business workflows. For instance, if a customer wants to market a product, they can instruct their catalog platform, powered by Writer’s models and applications, to pull up the specific product, post it on e-commerce sites like Amazon and Macy’s, and include other product information. The agentic workflow will then retrieve the product, connect to Amazon and Macy’s APIs, and list the product for sale.

“If it has a GUI, if it has a UI, AI will become a power agent. To us, agentic AI is the ability for AI to use AI plus third-party software and be able to reason its way through,” she explains.

Propelling agentic AI forward

To further its vision of agentic AI, Writer announced that it has secured $200 million in series C funding, raising its valuation to $1.9 billion.

Premiji Invest, Radical Ventures, and IOCNIQ Growth led the funding round. Other investors included Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, B Capital, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures, and Workday Ventures, along with existing investors in the company.

Habib states that the new funding will enable them to continue building on Writer’s existing work with design partners and other customers to bring automated workflows to life.