{"id":4096980,"date":"2025-11-28T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-28T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.computerworld.com\/article\/4096980\/ai-fluency-in-the-enterprise-still-a-horseless-carriage.html"},"modified":"2025-12-02T10:50:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T15:50:23","slug":"ai-fluency-in-the-enterprise-still-a-horseless-carriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.computerworld.com\/article\/4096980\/ai-fluency-in-the-enterprise-still-a-horseless-carriage.html","title":{"rendered":"AI fluency in the enterprise: Still a \u2018horseless carriage\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"remove_no_follow\">\n\t\t<div class=\"grid grid--cols-10@md grid--cols-8@lg article-column\">\n\t\t\t\t\t  <div class=\"col-12 col-10@md col-6@lg col-start-3@lg\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"article-column__content\">\n<section class=\"wp-block-bigbite-multi-title\"><div class=\"container\"><\/div><\/section>\n\n\n\n<p>Companies are tossing AI agents onto existing processes, but a transformative change &mdash; where AI is the boss &mdash; is still far away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That was the view of IT leaders at this year&rsquo;s&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/ignite.microsoft.com\/en-US\/home\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Microsoft Ignite conference<\/a>&nbsp;who&rsquo;ve been putting&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.computerworld.com\/article\/3846150\/how-ai-agents-work.html\">AI agents<\/a>&nbsp;to work, mostly with legacy processes. The IT leaders discussed their efforts during a conference panel at the event earlier this month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;re probably living in some version of the horseless carriage &mdash; we haven&rsquo;t got to the car yet,&rdquo; said&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/johnwhittaker\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">John Whittaker<\/a>, director of AI platform and products at accounting and consulting firm EY.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper youtube-video\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Why AI upskilling is failing, and how you can fix it\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/atr2QeuqubE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Execs from EY, Pfizer and Lumen who sat on the panel said they have mostly used AI agents for knowledge management, content creation and research.&nbsp;That aligns with findings in an&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.mckinsey.com\/capabilities\/quantumblack\/our-insights\/the-state-of-ai\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AI study released last month by McKinsey<\/a>, which found heavy use of AI tools in those areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With IT leaders facing pressure to transform their companies into AI-first operations, decision-makers see&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.computerworld.com\/article\/3843138\/agentic-ai-ongoing-coverage-of-its-impact-on-the-enterprise.html\">AI agents<\/a>&nbsp;as a way to uproot legacy processes for cost savings and productivity gains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>EY, the global tax and advisory firm, has 30 million documented processes internally and 41,000 agents in production. &ldquo;Moving those processes faster through agentic assistance like Copilot are kind of the low-hanging fruit to get to an improved outcome,&rdquo; Whittaker said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The early benefits of AI agents are now visible at EY; the endgame is to abstract processes and applications where data sits, Whittaker said.&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;We&rsquo;re beginning to see line of travel that really will allow us to completely transform the experiences,&rdquo; he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One agent, called the EY tax assistant, can answer questions and provide up-to-date tax knowledge to personnel and customers. There are approximately 100 tax changes each day, and the agent functions as a research tool for people to stay updated on thoe changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The fine-tuned model incorporates information from 21 million research and domain documents and is further tuned for field offices to receive relevant updates.&nbsp;&ldquo;A regular large language model [LLM] type deployment &hellip; can be very good, but nowhere near the quality of what you get out of a fine-tuned model,&rdquo; Whittaker said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pharmaceutical company Pfizer is taking a phased approach to putting agents in production. The company first tries out models, gains confidence in the results, and then scales it up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pfizer&rsquo;s call-center agents started in a few locations and ultimately spread to more locations. The agent answers queries and solves customer problems with real-time telemetry and information, said&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/timaholt\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tim Holt<\/a>, vice president of colleague and consumer technology and engineering at Pfizer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&ldquo;Being able to start with a couple of them [and] make them more efficient, then gives us the opportunity to do it again and again and just make better and better efficiency gains as we go,&rdquo; Holt said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pfizer is very process-centric, he said, stressing that the goal is not to reinvent processes right out of the gate. The company is analyzing how AI works for them, gaining confidence in the technology before&nbsp;&nbsp;reorganizing processes within the AI lens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&ldquo;Where we&rsquo;re definitely heading &hellip; is thinking about, &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve solved this process, I&rsquo;ve been following exactly the way it exists today. Now let&rsquo;s blow it up and reimagine it&hellip;&rsquo; &mdash; and that&rsquo;s exciting,&rdquo; he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>About half of Pfizer&rsquo;s 75,000 employees use&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.computerworld.com\/article\/4064781\/microsoft-upgrades-m365-copilot-with-agent-mode.html\">Microsoft&rsquo;s Copilot tools<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Lumen CEO Kate Johnson is one such user, relying on Copilot for tasks that include research and executive briefings, said&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/seanalex\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sean Alexander<\/a>, senior vice president at the telecom firm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Using gaming terminology, Alexander outlined a multi-step process for autonomous agents driving company processes. Level one is human-to-agent, level two is human-to-multi-agent, and level three is &ldquo;when you have full orchestration happening between the different agents,&rdquo; Alexander said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Lumen is now looking at where it wants the business to be in 36 months and linking it to AI agents and AI-native plans. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re &hellip; working back from that and ensuring that we have the right set of tools, the right set of training, and the right set of agents in order to enable that,&rdquo; he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Every new Lumen employee in Alexander&rsquo;s connected ecosystem group gets a Copilot license. The technology has helped speed up the process of understanding acronyms and historical trends within the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&ldquo;It takes about six months for a new employee to become fully realized in terms of their potential. It is getting shaved down to three months,&rdquo; Alexander said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Lumen spent a week with Microsoft and Harvard looking at specifically where the puck is moving with AI agents. &ldquo;We are absolutely in the early innings of agentic technology,&rdquo; he said.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Companies are tossing AI agents onto existing processes, but a transformative change &mdash; where AI is the boss &mdash; is still far away. That was the view of IT leaders at this year&rsquo;s&nbsp;Microsoft Ignite conference&nbsp;who&rsquo;ve been putting&nbsp;AI agents&nbsp;to work, mostly with legacy processes. The IT leaders discussed their efforts during a conference panel at the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":100070015,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"__idg_published_ids":[],"__idg_published_status":"draft","embargo_date":"","multi_title":"{\"titles\":{\"headline\":{\"value\":\"AI fluency in the enterprise: Still a &lsquo;horseless carriage&rsquo;\",\"additional\":{\"short_title\":\"AI fluency in the enterprise: Still a &lsquo;horseless carriage&rsquo;\",\"headline_subheadline\":\"Panelists at this month&#039;s Microsoft Ignite event talked about their efforts to roll out agentic AI at their companies, including what works &mdash; and what still needs work.\",\"headline_desc\":\"Panelists at this month&#039;s Microsoft Ignite event talked about their efforts to roll out agentic AI at their companies, including what works &mdash; and what still needs 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