Agent Cody Banks on AI: how businesses are optimising workflows with AI agents

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 AI driven chatbot and human technology ChatGPT THUMB IMAGE ETTECHAmazon’s CEO Andy Jassy recently mentioned that their AI coding assistant, Amazon Q, has saved the company $260 million and 4,500 developer years. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes there could eventually be more AI agents than people in the world. Big tech companies like OpenAI, Meta, Amazon, and Google envision agentic AI as the future of personal assistance and business functions, achieving automation of tasks in ways previously unimaginable.An AI agent is a software program that can interact with its environment, learn, adapt, choose its own goals, and execute actions on behalf of a user. It can automate tasks, solve complex problems, think on its feet, and act autonomously. If OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022 took the world by storm, AI agents built on some of these models are the next big thing in the world of AI, especially for enterprise usage.

Productivity, efficiency cost saving


Companies such as E42.ai, Fractal, Zoho, Supervity.ai and several others are building these AI agents, capable of acting independently and solving complex tasks to automate processes in industries like finance, HR, and customer service, and enhance data analysis. The AI agent market is rapidly growing. Businesses are leveraging these agents to reduce costs, optimise workflows, and unlock new capabilities, with the AI market projected to expand significantly in the coming years. According to Emergen Research, the agentic AI market was valued at $30.89 billion, with 20% of the business concentrated in North America. The segment is expected to grow at an annual rate of 31.68% over the next few years. This is evident in the ways startups are integrating agents into functions like HR, finance, IT service management, customer services, data science, procurement, and more. New York-based Fulcrum Digital, which serves large operations in India, is set to unveil an Enterprise Agent Store this year, offering over 250 agents in diverse areas.

“In insurance, we offer agents for claim processing, premium pricing forecasts, and underwriting support,” said Rajesh Sinha, founder and chairman of Fulcrum Digital. “For education, we have student admission and course recommendation agents. Retail benefits from personalised shopping and inventory management agents.”“Financial services utilise our real-time credit scoring and transaction anomaly detection agents. HR departments leverage our performance review feedback and audit agents. We also provide specialised agents for document processing, sales support, and customer service across industries,” Sinha added.

Pune-based E42.ai reported its multifunctional ‘AI workers’ have automated over 200 processes, saved 200,000 man-hours, and resolved 3 million queries. For instance, its accounts payable AI executive, Neil, processed 10 million invoices from various channels like chat, vendor portals, and emails in 13 languages without human intervention. Similarly, its AI IT Ops Manager, Walter, autonomously resolves IT help desk queries, according to the company.

“These agents excel at processing and analysing massive datasets at unprecedented speeds, uncovering valuable insights that would be time-consuming or impossible for humans to find,” said Sanjeev Menon, cofounder and head of product & tech at E42.ai.

Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, director of AI research at Manage Engine, the enterprise IT software solutions division of Zoho Corp said that businesses are likely to begin deploying agents starting 2025.

For instance, for an IT monitoring system, an LLM can provide a summary of the failures logged but cannot pinpoint the exact number of failures in a given timeframe. “But you add an agent there - now the agent can just do a count query on a search API and give you the deterministic answer from the logs along with the descriptive answer from the LLM,” he explained.

Another Virginia-based startup, Supervity. ai, which serves clients like Daikin, Mondelez, and Ultratech, believes GenAI is a force multiplier, reducing its time-to-market significantly. Cofounder Vijay Navaluri explained that the multimodal capabilities of GenAI are unlocking new use cases that were not possible using traditionally siloed automation technologies.

“The biggest challenges for CXOs are enhancing revenue, reducing costs, managing risk, and improving customer experience,” said Paramdeep Singh, cofounder of Shorthills AI. “The answer to all these challenges is potentially found in the data lake of large enterprise customers. Shorthills AI utilises LLM Agents on top of these data lakes.”

The company has built AI agents to create a SaaS tool in the legal domain that understands and codifies Acts, old judgments, rulings, and legal cases. These agents have reasoning capabilities and can argue for and against cases, providing the probability of the most likely outcome, Singh explained.

But, there are hurdles


While there’s a huge potential for AI agents to enhance productivity, save costs and automate mundane tasks, the process of building and deploying these agents is fraught with challenges. Most critical of those is data scarcity and data quality. In many areas, the amount of data needed to train AI systems is scarce. Companies in healthcare and banking also refrain from training AI with sensitive customer data due to privacy concerns.

Greater autonomy to AI agents could also mean them executing incorrect actions, for instance, meddling with health data to give improper prescriptions, or taking biased actions while processing insurance claims. Sometimes, AI systems trained on past data can fail to make future predictions, in areas like making stock investment recommendations. It is also difficult to integrate agents with legacy IT applications of enterprises. For instance, integrating a new AI-based recommendation engine with an old ecommerce platform might require significant changes to the platform’s API

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Booming Cross-Border E-Commerce Activity in Asia Presents Opportunities for European Merchants VARIOUS Booming Cross-Border E-Commerce Activity in Asia Presents Opportunities for European Merchants by Fintechnews Switzerland September 12, 2023 International e-commerce spending by JCB cardholders based in Asia increased by 52% between 2021 and 2022, presenting a significant opportunity for merchants in Europe as shoppers across the region show increasing willingness to purchase goods online from foreign businesses, a new paper by the Japanese credit card company shows. The report, titled “Click into Place: Unpacking Card Abandonment”, provides insights on online spending from Asia, sharing the latest research and data on e-commerce trends to help businesses boost e-commerce sales and stand out from the crowd. According to the report, cross-border e-commerce activity increased substantially last year, with India leading the region with a staggering five-fold growth, followed by Indonesia and Vietnam, where cross-border e-commerce more than doubled between 2021 and 2023. In Hong Kong and the Philippines, global e-commerce spending grew by around 80%, while China, Taiwan and Thailand saw growth of about 50%. Further growth is expected in the future as the cart abandonment rate in Asia’s e-commerce industry is currently the highest in the world, standing at over 84% as of March 2023 compared with about 70% for customers globally. High cart abandonment in Asia suggests that there is potential for more expansion in the region if merchants are able to solve customers’ friction points and improve experience, the report says. cross border e-commerce image via freepik Addressing cart abandonment Cart abandonment is the act of a shopper adding an item to an online shopping cart but leaving the website without completing the purchase. It represents a significant amount of lost revenue for merchants in the online space. According to JCB, there are several cause of cart abandonment, with the first common one being the payment journey. In Asia, complicated checkouts and unexpected payment processes are cited as a reason for abandoning carts, with 55% of online shoppers in the region identifying long login and sign-up forms as a key source of frustrated. To address this paint point and boost sales, merchants must enhance customer experience by streamlining their checkout process with a well-designed website. They should also leverage advanced technology and design practices to balance security with user experience, using for example pre-fill information and tokenization to speed up the checkout process, as well as technology like 3DS authentication to increase consumer trust. Such improvements not only increase immediate sales and conversion rates but also foster long-term brand loyalty, the report says. The second cause of cart abandonment outlined in the JCB report is unmet customer expectations around how they can pay, and how easy it is to do so. Understanding customer psychology is vital to reduce cart abandonment in e-commerce, the report says. To cater to local preferences, merchants should offer multiple languages and payment currencies, provide a personalized customer journey, and ensure that payment processes are seamless across both mobile and desktop platforms. This is critical become mobile purchases are on the rise, representing 43% of e-commerce sales globally in 2023. 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