Major US business software vendors, including Microsoft and SAP, have launched a new wave of artificial intelligence-driven innovation in recent months, rolling out a series of new “AI agents” designed to perform tasks in the corporate finance and other business functions.

The recent industry developments come as many executives face increasing pressure to make the kind of AI investments that can bring optimal value to their organizations after the experiences of the past two years, analysts say. It also comes, they say, as some of the initial hype around generative AI – spurred largely by the introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022 – has started to fade.

“There was this phase where people were in love” with technology, Mark McDonald, senior managing analyst at Gartner, said in an interview. “They, I kind of took that first step in the water to try it out and got varying levels of results, most being pretty ho-hum.

McDonald said he had spoken recently with customers who were “We are done with the “experimenting and imagining what we can do” phase of AI adoption. “Now it’s about turning these AI ambitions into concrete plans,” he said.

The coming year presents the opportunity to scale and advance AI capabilities across the enterprise, and a majority of organizations are turning to AI agents (tools capable of working independently to complete tasks and adapt in real time) to help them achieve this. KPMG said in a January 9 statement announcing the results of the investigation.

According to the study, more than half (51%) of organizations are exploring the use of AI agents and 37% are testing them.

Agentic AI technology is poised to revolutionize industries, handling complex tasks with human-like decision-making, but it also poses risks such as hallucinations, where a tool asserts errors as if they were trueaccording to Shomit Ghose, Silicon Valley venture capitalist and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mitigating the risks of agentic AI will require transparent design, strong security measures, and governance to maximize benefits while minimizing harm. Ghose said in an article published last month speak Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at UC Berkeley.

“Ultimately, perhaps no agentic AI will be fully autonomous: humans may still need to be involved… especially when material actions are necessary,” he added.

Here is a list of some of the biggest players in the tech world developing or delivering AI agents to streamline finance and other business functions:

SAP

At its annual conference TechEd Conference in OctoberSAP announced the launch of new innovations, including AI agents, to complement its generative AI co-pilot known as “Joule”.

The deployment included agents designed to “streamline key financial processes by automating invoice payments, invoice processing and general ledger updates while quickly correcting inconsistencies or errors,” according to a press release.

“We will definitely have a lot more (AI deployments) over the next year,” Walter Sun, global head of AI at SAP, said in an interview.

As part of its approach to mitigating AI risks, the company supports the policy that “the human must always be in the know,” according to Sun. “Joule agents and SAP AI provide recommendations to the user, which the user then checks and decides how to act,” he said.

The company said it was not prepared to disclose whether the agents had been fully rolled out to the public or how pricing was being managed. “We will announce news at our Business Unleashed event on February 13 that will provide more details on this,” a spokesperson said.

ServiceNow

ServiceNow announced in September that it was plans to integrate agentic AI in its platform with the potential for “massive scale across all use cases.”

Since this announcement, the company has delivered its first two agentic AI use cases, one for customer service management and another for IT service management.

The software provider is now focused on adapting AI agents for more use cases across functions, including finance, procurement and human resources, Kirsten said. Lögering, ServiceNow vice president of product management, finance and supply chain workflows, said in an email.