Dispatches from the road
On the road again
I just can't wait to get on the road again
The life I love is making music with my friends
And I can't wait to get on the road again
~ Willie Nelson, On The Road Again
I’ve been doing a fair bit of traveling recently and I thought it might be interesting to catch you up on some of my observations from the road.
Last week I was in San Francisco, where I recorded a sponsored video interview with Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain and CTO Amrit Jassal, moderated a panel on agentic security for Realm Labs and attended two conferences: Constellation Research's Connected Enterprise and GitHub Universe. This week I was in Boston for an AWS media event.
Yes, it's been a busy time, but I’ve learned lots along the way about the realities and challenges of implementing agentic AI from basic change management issues and institutional inertia to the constantly-changing technology to the real challenges around agentic security and governance.
One of the ironies here is that as AWS executive in residence Tom Godden pointed out, yes, some companies have figured out how to build an agent, and they even have taken processes that took hours or days and cut them to a fraction of that, but it hasn’t necessarily produced better outcomes yet. There’s a kind of ‘what now and what did we actually gain’ kind of reaction.
In a concrete example, Godden pointed to a company he spoke to that reduced a process from two hours of work down to 35 seconds. The executive went looking for what that gained him and he struggled to find concrete metrics like more jobs completed or increased revenue. "The freed capacity we found without any destination is just overhead,” he said.
It reminds me of a couple of years ago when I was getting physical therapy for a problem I was having with my foot at the time. The therapist asked me to stand on one leg 30 seconds. I said I couldn’t do it on the bad foot. She looked at me and said, “you can't do it yet,” and she was right. A couple of weeks later I could. Large organizations are like me early in PT, it seems, they are struggling to find their balance.
Regardless of the event or the speakers, the themes were surprisingly similar. AI has the capacity to give you wings (to borrow a phrase from the Red Bull commercial), but that velocity produces a whole host of different problems and companies don't always know how to control their new super powers.
Speed creates its own set of problems
Coding is the most successful agentic use case yet, but just because you can produce code faster doesn't necessarily mean that you can keep up further down the pipeline, or keep product, sales, marketing and especially customers in the loop. That's the more difficult part.
As Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain told me, "Just slinging features very quickly doesn't get you any bonus points." Customers may lack the ability to pivot as quickly. They typically have configured the software and workflows to work a certain way within their particular environment, and they can't just slap on new features willy-nilly without testing and looking for possible issues. They have actual businesses to run. They aren't in the new feature implementation business.
Kyle Daigle, chief operating officer at GitHub, perhaps put it best when he said, "The [code] generation is easy, the creating and deploying software part is quite difficult." GitHub, of course, will be happy to help you with that, but the point is that the bottleneck is shifting from generating code to figuring out what to do with all the code that's being generated, and how you make sure it's safe, secure and compliant, and not just slop created by a bot.
And once deployed, especially with non-technical users involved, how do you keep everything safe and secure? As more agents get deployed, that challenge becomes more difficult. As Charles Iheagwara, head of AI cybersecurity delivery operations at AstraZeneca, said during a panel at CCE aptly titled Do you know what your agents did last night?, “Let's not confuse controls with observability.” He pointed out that vendors can provide elaborate dashboards full of metrics about what agents are doing, but how do you prove those metrics are accurate or that agents are operating within their prescribed boundaries? Being able to observe what agents do isn't necessarily the same as being able to control them.
All of these conversations point to a similar set of issues. AI can do some amazing things, but organizations are still struggling to figure out how to take advantage of it safely and securely. The trouble is that technology is moving faster than most companies can adapt, and if they can't figure out what to do with that newfound speed, they'll just end up creating a whole new set of problems faster than ever.
Disclosure: I was paid by Egnyte to conduct a video interview with its CEO and CTO and by Realm Labs to moderate a panel on agentic security during my visit to San Francisco. Neither company had any editorial input into this column.
~Ron
