"Agentic AI has taken center stage in the worlds of AI, tech, and business, dominating the discourse and furthering the pressure for companies to swiftly integrate the tech or fall behind their competitors. More than anyone, it's chief AI officers (CAIOs) who are charged with untangling the promises and realities of AI's latest buzzword. As they oversee experimentation with and rollouts of AI agents and guide other leaders on the journey, CAIOs are also navigating through the hype, concerns around security and trust, and interconnectedness (or lack thereof) of these systems. Not to mention having to grapple with the question: What even is an AI agent?"
"No one can seem to agree on what, exactly, the term "AI agent" really means, as and others have reported. Companies are defining the term differently and often using it to describe varied features and capabilities, including many that were previously described with other terms such as "AI assistants." For Accenture chief AI officer Lan Guan, who led the build of an AI agent solution called Zora for clients and also works directly with them on their own AI and AI agent deployments, this has caused her to devote a great deal of time to just helping clients sort through the contradictions."
""A year ago, everyone was saying, 'I need to do gen AI.' Now everyone is saying, 'I need to do agentic AI or AI agents.' And it's like, at the end of the day, a lot of these things are still the same thing. They're just getting called different things depending on who you're talking to," she said. "And so there's a ton of confusion in the marketplace with our clients on, 'What is an AI agent? What am I deploying?' And so we spend a lot of time on education.""
Agentic AI is driving rapid adoption pressure across industries and forcing companies to decide whether to integrate agentic systems quickly or risk falling behind. Chief AI officers lead experimentation and rollouts, while confronting ambiguous definitions, security and trust concerns, and uneven system interoperability. Organizations often relabel existing assistant features as "AI agents," creating marketplace confusion. CAIOs spend significant time educating stakeholders and clarifying what deployments actually entail. Hype-driven efforts can produce superficial, publicity-focused launches, increasing the risk of misaligned expectations, governance gaps, and insecure implementations that fail to deliver sustained business value.
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