In numerous blogs and articles since 2019, I’ve shared my vision of a more autonomous supply chain, segmented by decision, augmented by intelligent agents, supported by collaboration between human and machine and a change in operating model for the knowledge worker. It is good to see the market and some thought leaders are catching up with these ideas.

What I wrote about then is now happening with agenticAI. At Aera Technology, I have had the privilege to have a front seat of implementing Decision Intelligence and intelligent agents for almost 7 years and observed the journey the market is going through.

Now Decision Intelligence is a defined category by Gartner and other analysts and AgenticAI is maturing at warp speed, here are four strategic pillars for a business to stay competitive. I foresee this as the direction of business transformations in the next decade.

👉 Decision transformation: we’ll see in the next few years that companies will discover that decisions are one of their most valuable assets. They will segment their most important decisions and rearchitect them to stay competitive. They will make the strategic choice to rethink how they operate from the decision backwards. This is a big strategic decision, as it will utterly change the operating model of a business. The next decade(s) will be about decision transformation, as it (partially) solves the siloed organization we’ve created that can’t move faster anymore, whilst the world does.

👉 Knowledge work redesigned: operating models and business processes will be redesigned according to cross functional or cross enterprise decision flows. The decision architecture will highlight where humans lead, where humans are augmented, where human-machine collaboration is required and where the machine leads (autonomy), within boundaries set by humans. Organizational design, R&R and incentives will change accordingly. Work around the physical assets of the supply chain (factories, warehouses, trucks) has been re-designed for 100+ years.  Next up is the knowledge worker.

👉 Agentic staying power: AgenticAI is here to stay. It’s simply evolution. Although early stages and very hyped, it will find its way to mainstream and remains a dominant force in the next 30 years or so (some businesses still use the APS I implemented 25 years ago 😀). However, companies that implement agents without having realized the first 2 steps (siloed, not decision centric and humanAI redesigned), won’t extract the value they need. Those agents end up on the #Agentgraveyard

👉It’s a platform transition: to make the transformation highlighted in the first three steps, in a global business, at scale, integrated with a complex multi-layered legacy stack, you require a dedicated platform. A platform that has data integration, decisions, agents, learning and human engagement at its core.  Some of the world largest, and most AI-focused companies have tried to build Agents bottom up from scratch and did not succeed in scaling. Many point solution agents build in the next few years, siloed, with vibe coding, will look beautiful, but can’t be scaled and also end on the #Agentgraveyard.

Business leaders would be wise to keep these four pillars – and their order of execution – top of mind.