Agentic is the new "we need a website"

Remember the late ’90s? When companies started to realize they needed an online presence? When the early playbook was to buy a domain name and create a website? Some were slow to adopt. Some were not. Entrepreneurs like Faisal Shah were in the right place at the right time to capitalize on this movement with domain registration software (Markmonitor). The early adopters were well positioned to compete in the dot-com frenzy that followed.

The end result? It is now considered table stakes. Everybody has an online presence. Imagine telling your late-’90s self what you now know to be true about the importance of online presence today.

I love a good analogy. This feels analogous to the agentic movement today. The need for companies to rapidly adopt enterprise agentic solutions feels a lot like what happened in the late ’90s: “We need a website.” Maybe some of you remember.

This feels very different from other trends that came and went, like NFTs.

This feels like another moment in time where a new technology enabled tool inevitably becomes table stakes. Early adopters will have the advantage. Laggards will be playing catch-up. In this wave, the cost of being late might be significant because the force-multiplying effect of agentic solutions is so substantial. In other words, if your competitors adopt an enterprise agentic strategy before you do, the acceleration it provides could create a sizable gap in your ability to operate efficiently, continue providing amazing products and services, and remain competitive.

You don’t need to boil the ocean to get started. Big enterprise platforms will be happy to do VERY large and costly expansions to give you some agentic capabilities. Often you are paying too much, you end up with multiple fractured agentic tools silo’d by the vendor and it takes a very long time to actually see real, measurable value.

You need to find a way to be vendor agnostic. To have agentic capabilities across any system without vendor specific agents with limited visibility. To be able to rapidly deploy, learn and prove ROI before committing to MASSIVE expansions with the big players.

Crawl, walk, run. Start with a key area of the business that is high-friction and heavily dependent on humans. Work with a company specializing in agentic capabilities for the enterprise. You might be surprised that working with smaller companies to “crawl” can be a huge advantage in speed. Able Software is a small company that is hyper focused on this exact solution. The small companies are going to give you a huge amount of focus. They have very few layers to go through to go fast. Small is fast. Small is VIP treatment for every customer.

Regardless of the direction you choose, just start crawling. If you are crawling already then figure out how to accelerate to walking, asap.