At last week’s AI Agent Builder Summit, hosted by Scott Hebner of theCUBE Research, the hype around “agentic AI” – autonomous software agents that can orchestrate complex tasks – was on full display. Demos and keynotes painted a bold vision of AI-driven business processes. But scratch beneath the surface, and a sobering reality emerges– Most enterprises are far from ready to reap the benefits of fully autonomous agents. Much work needs to be done to realize the full promise of agentic systems, including organizational alignment to create a true data culture, cleaning up data silos, harmonizing that data, assigning data ownership, data product thinking, getting governance and security right, choosing technology partners, rationalizing SaaS and on-prem applications portfolios, and of course change management to get all this done. Starting the journey toward an agentic enterprise is an exciting imperative, but in our view will take the better part of a decade to realize its full promise.

In this Breaking Analysis, we put the summit’s optimism into context, examine why enterprise adoption of agentic AI is on a slower trajectory than the hype would imply, and update our “yellow brick road” to agentic – i.e. the stepping stones required to get to the promised land of agentic automation.