Over Half of Companies Already Deploying AI Agents, PagerDuty Study Reveals

More than half of companies already deploy autonomous AI agents, study finds

Agents are the latest trend in artificial intelligence, with several tech giants claiming they will provide a major boost in productivity for businesses. And it turns out most companies are already sold on the idea. More than half of companies are already using AI agents in their workflows, according to an international survey published by cloud computing company PagerDuty (PD+0.16%) on Tuesday. The study, which surveyed a thousand IT and business executives, also found that another 35% of companies plan to integrate AI agents by 2027. The trend was most pronounced in the U.K., with 66% saying they already deploy AI agents, while the U.S. trailed at 48%. AI agents are specialized and fully autonomous AIs that can expedite certain workflows for businesses. They can help schedule shifts, and even make strategic assessments and propose courses of action. And they have been all the rage in tech recently, with major companies working around the clock to roll out their own version of the technology. "PagerDuty's latest survey data illustrates how strongly organizations believe agentic AI will help unlock real value from AI and automation, as 62% of survey respondents anticipate triple-digit ROI," PagerDuty chief information officer Eric Johnson said in a press release announcing the study. U.S. companies expect the highest return, worth almost twice the initial investment at 192%, the survey found. The companies overwhelmingly expect AI agents to expedite or completely automate more than at least a quarter of company workloads. But when it came to comparing the potential of agentic AI capabilities with existing generative AI technology, the business leaders were split. Forty-four percent thought agentic AI would prove to be more disruptive than generative AI, while 40% sided with generative AI. Sixteen percent of respondents said they think the two technologies will have about the same impact. While both tend to largely rely on large language models, generative AI focuses on creating content like text, images or video in response to human prompts, whereas agentic AI is autonomous and more proactive rather than reactive. Late last year, Salesforce (CRM+0.63%) CEO Marc Benioff claimed that we are entering an "agentic era" with autonomous AI agents positioned to disrupt the workplace. But some analysts, like Goldman Sachs head of global equity research Jim Covello, thread a more skeptical approach, arguing that the expensive investments in agentic AI might yield surprisingly modest returns. More companies have integrated generative AI into their workflows than agentic AI at this point of adoption, according to the survey, with 63% responding that it is now fully integrated and another 24% saying that generative AI is deployed but not yet fully integrated into operations. The company executives pointed to mistakes with generative AI adoption that they hope to avoid while integrating AI agents. Namely, many think their companies rushed into it without sufficient planning or that they ended up spending too much on the technology. Agentic AI's potential is not all peachy either. Many respondents to the survey were worried about the very real risks of adopting the technology. Among the chief concerns was security. The more a company tasks agentic AI systems to interact with sensitive company data, the more that data is vulnerable to security breaches and AI-targeted cyber attacks. Business executives were also worried about evolving AI regulation and privacy laws that might endanger company operations in the future, bad data inputs that could lead to worse output quality, and AI hallucinations -- factually incorrect or nonsensical outputs that continue to plague AI as the technology continues to evolve.

PagerDuty Report Finds More Than Half of Companies Have Deployed AI Agents

PagerDuty On Tour -- PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD), a global leader in digital operations management, today released an international survey that reveals how organizations are moving beyond generative AI (GenAI) to implement agentic AI for greater automation, operational efficiency and business impact. The findings, based on insights from 1,000 IT and business executives across the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Japan, reveal that more than half (51%) of companies are already leveraging AI agents. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250401230721/en/ To read the full report, including survey findings and methodology, please visit here. The adoption of GenAI has surged, with McKinsey & Company reporting usage in at least one business function rising from 33% in 2023 to 71% by July 2024. Now, agentic AI adoption is poised to accelerate even faster while reshaping automation and decision-making across industries. Companies are no longer just experimenting. The latest PagerDuty survey data shows that 94% of companies believe they will adopt agentic AI more quickly than GenAI, with 55% strongly agreeing that they will integrate it across their organizations at an accelerated pace. As businesses look to automate complex workflows and drive efficiency, agentic AI is emerging as the next phase of AI-driven transformation, offering faster deployment and deeper operational impact. Key Findings "Leaders need to provide tangible, quantifiable benefits from their AI deployments if they want to justify the investment," said Eric Johnson, chief information officer at PagerDuty. "PagerDuty's latest survey data illustrates how strongly organizations believe agentic AI will help unlock real value from AI and automation, as 62% of survey respondents anticipate triple-digit ROI. Companies that successfully integrate agentic AI into their operations can expect increased efficiency gains by automating complexity and accelerating decision-making." Many organizations learned firsthand that insufficient training hindered GenAI adoption and are taking a different approach with agentic AI. Every company surveyed has various plans to implement agentic AI training, with 61% prioritizing organization-wide seminars or structured initiatives. Additionally, 56% of organizations will offer an external course to their employees, while 52% plan to host official office hours and formal internal mentorship programs to ensure employees can effectively integrate and leverage AI agents in their workflows. PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD) is a global leader in digital operations management, enabling customers to achieve operational efficiency at scale with the PagerDuty Operations Cloud. The PagerDuty Operations Cloud combines AIOps, Automation, Customer Service Operations and Incident Management with a powerful generative AI assistant and AI agents to create a flexible, resilient and scalable platform to increase innovation velocity, grow revenue, reduce cost, and mitigate the risk of operational failure. Nearly half of the Fortune 500 and approximately two-thirds of the Fortune 100 rely on PagerDuty as essential infrastructure for the modern enterprise. To learn more and try PagerDuty for free, visit www.pagerduty.com. The PagerDuty Operations Cloud The PagerDuty Operations Cloud is the platform for mission-critical, time-critical operations work in the modern enterprise. Through the power of AI and automation, it detects and diagnoses disruptive events, mobilizes the right team members to respond, and streamlines infrastructure and workflows across your digital operations. The Operations Cloud is essential infrastructure for revolutionizing digital operations to compete and win as a modern digital business. For the purpose of this survey, "agentic AI" was defined as, "Autonomous agents designed to gather data, make decisions and execute tasks to achieve predefined goals. Unlike AI chatbots, agentic AI may be employed for more context-aware conversations, continuous learning, and personalized responses for a wider range of tasks."