IT fundamentals still apply — even in AI era

When you have been around enterprise computing long enough, you start to see history constantly repeating itself. With each new technological wave, it feels like we are being told that the old rules don’t apply this time. AI agents are the latest hot trend, but guess what: fundamentals always apply, regardless of the technology.

There are no shortcuts, my friends, and that’s even more true if you are part of a regulated industry. As my colleague Ed Sim pointed out in a LinkedIn post this week, agents are everywhere, but companies that really want to stand out from the crowd are going to have to solve what he called the last mile problems, which turn out to be all those things that large organizations care about: “security, privacy, compliance, integrations, determinism and repeatability, accuracy, memory, cost, orchestrating swarms of agents, and even more security.”

As I pointed out in this space last week, it was a little mind-boggling to me that we have been creating agents without communications protocols up until recently, yet that’s just one step of many. Sure, they have to communicate with each other – obviously – but they also need to have all of these characteristics that Sim listed. Without them, you can’t hope to build and implement complex, enterprise-ready agentic solutions that large organizations are going to be lining up to buy.

I feel like we’ve been here before

I’ve been thinking about the current agentic moment this week and how it reminds of another time, not all that long ago actually. Think back just four years to 2021 when RPA, workflow and low code tools were coming together to have a moment of their own. UiPath, the RPA leader, was riding high, ready to go public and sporting a $35 billion valuation. No code and low code tools were proliferating and workflow automation was getting oodles of attention. There was a ton of M&A in these areas too, as the larger players like SAP and ServiceNow jockeyed for position. (Sound familiar?)

But it didn’t really work out the way people expected. While RPA was effective for automating repetitive, rules-based tasks, it was rigid and had trouble scaling and adapting to changes in the workflow, something that agents are supposed to excel at. Even UiPath founder and CEO Daniel Dines acknowledged in a recent interview with The Verge, that agentic AI and workflow automation are coming together in a new way. 

“The way we are seeing the adoption of combined agentic AI and automation is by putting a workflow technology on top of it,” he said. It’s worth noting that UiPath’s stock price has plunged since it went public in April, 2021 from the opening price of $56 a share to $10.45 with a market cap of around $5 billion as of this week, well below that lofty pre-IPO valuation. 

A lot of trends we saw coming together in 2021 are suddenly back in vogue, but this time AI agents are displacing everything from coding to workflow to process automation.

Ignore the noise

It’s easy to succumb to the hype, but Thomas Squeo, Americas CTO at tech consultancy ThoughtWorks, says fundamentals still apply with agents. “At the end of the day, you have to manage it as a piece of enterprise software because vibe coding alone (coding with the help of AI agents) is only going to get you in trouble,” he said. Even with agents in place, maybe especially with them in place, large companies still need to pay close attention to how they manage risk.

“I think that the biggest issue that I've seen is that enterprise risk is the force of gravity that everybody has to pay attention to,” he said. “That’s because as soon as you have to disclose how you're maintaining a production system, and what the risk profile of that system is in the enterprise, especially for publicly-held companies, that disclosure risk makes everybody more conservative.”

"I think that the biggest issue that I've seen is that enterprise risk is the force of gravity that everybody has to pay attention to."

The problem with hype is that it puts pressure on organizations to implement technologies they might not be fully ready for. Yes, you need to be exploring how agents could potentially transform your organization, but ultimately, there are no implementation shortcuts for enterprise companies, no matter how loud the buzz gets. Your company still has to adhere to the same fundamental principles of enterprise computing, whether it’s agents or any other shiny new technology, and there’s just no getting around that.

~Ron

Featured image by Albert Stoynov on Unsplash