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Where to Start with Agentic AI?

By Erol Karabeg,

Co-Founder, President @ Authority Partners

October 6, 2025

Executive View

Every leader I meet wants AI to “do more with less”. The question is where to start without risking the core. The most reliable on‑ramps we are seeing fall into these three categories: Enterprise Search, Customer Support, and Application Integration. These are repeatable, measurable, and friendly to existing systems and controls.

What’s changing?
  • Budgets are shifting from experiments to core IT spend; leaders want measurable outcomes, not pilots.
  • Agentic tooling matured to plug into existing apps with governance, logs, and human‑in‑the‑loop.
  • Adoption expectations tightened to first value inside a quarter, then scale with controls.

The three quick-win categories

1.) Enterprise search

Unlock buried knowledge across SharePoint, Confluence, email, CRM, ticketing, and data warehouses with source‑linked answers. Common first wins:

  • Policy and compliance lookup that compiles audit‑ready evidence packages.
  • Customer and account briefings that pull CRM, invoicing, and support history into one page before a call.
  • Onboarding Q&A that routes to the right form and resource, not just a document.
  • RFP acceleration that mines prior proposals and pricing models for reusable sections.
  • Expert finder that identifies who solved a similar problem, then drafts the intro message.
  • Cross‑system operational queries that aggregate metrics and auto‑generate a chart in Excel or Power BI.
Outcomes you can expect

Revenue lift from better‑prepared client interactions, lower time spent searching, stronger compliance posture, faster onboarding, and happier teams who can find and act on the right information quickly.

2.) Customer Support

Enable self-service across your workflows, while keeping humans for approvals and edge cases. First wins we see often:

  • Contextual ticket resolution that validates policies, checks invoices, and writes the sourced explanation back to the case.
  • 360-degree customer view embedded in the agent’s screen.
  • Automated warranty claims that verify terms and file the case with confirmations.
  • Tier‑1 IT help desk for password resets and common fixes with secure execution.
  • Case summarization on escalation so the next rep does not start from zero.
  • Proactive escalation triggered by negative sentiment alerts to a supervisor.
Outcomes you can expect

Lower support costs, higher retention, audit‑ready records, more throughput per agent, and faster time to resolution across channels.

3.) Application Integration

Let agents translate messy inputs and public information into clean actions across your stack. Remove manual re‑entry between CRM, ERP, billing, and help desk tools. Good starting points:

  • Public data collection that feeds competitive or regulatory intelligence into CRM and BI.
  • Unstructured message parsing from email or WhatsApp into structured orders in Salesforce or Dynamics.
  • Automated acknowledgements that draft and send natural‑language confirmations when ERP events fire.
  • Meeting prep and follow‑up that aggregates context, logs action items, and drafts next steps.
  • Vendor and contract monitoring that flags SLA breaches or pricing anomalies.
  • Cross‑system case updates that close the loop in billing, CRM, and project tools.
Outcomes you can expect

Lower manual entry, fewer errors, faster order capture, reduced compliance risk, and real‑time data that improves decisions.

Proof points from the field
  • Automating research at scale in Financial SaaS. A custom agentic research assistant cut data collection and validation time by 75 percent, reduced costs, and freed analysts for higher‑value work. (Story: Transforming Data Intelligence with AI Automation.)
  • Tech refresh for resilience and speed in Flexible Workspace. A cloud‑first shift reduced operating costs, improved reliability, and increased the pace of innovation across global operations. (Story: Cloud‑native Migration in Workspace.)
  • Compliance‑driven modernization in Title Insurance. A new EPC integration and secure workflow cut fee‑quote entry time by over 50 percent, strengthened compliance, and improved retention. (Story: Encompass EPC Migration with Microservices.)

These are the kinds of measurable, operations‑level wins that build momentum for broader transformation.

How to win the first 90 days

0–30 days: Choose the workflow and write the Agent Job Description (AJD)

  • Pick one high‑friction workflow in enterprise search, customer support, or app integration; ship inside tools people already use.
  • Draft a 1‑page Agent Job Description (AJD): mission, scope (triggers, tasks, decisions), systems/data, permissions (read, write, approve, escalate), guardrails (quality, PII), KPIs, escalation path, change cadence.
  • Baseline today’s metrics; enable light governance from day one (least‑privilege, audit logs, simple evaluation routine).

31–60 days: Prove value with a prototype agent

  • Launch a prototype that completes one outcome end to end with human‑in‑the‑loop for approvals and edge cases.
  • Measure adoption, cycle time, accuracy, and deflection; tune prompts, connectors, and evaluation.

61–90 days: Clone the pattern and harden

  • Expand to 2–3 similar flows that share data and policies.
  • Standardize prompts, integrations, and evaluation so each new agent is cheaper and safer to launch.
  • Strengthen governance: role‑based access, output sampling, drift checks, and change control; update the AJD as scope grows and run an ROI checkpoint vs. baseline.

After 90 days: MVP and broader rollout

  • Complete guardrails and the feedback loop, then expose the agent to the full intended audience.
Common pitfalls to avoid
  • Boiling the ocean. Aim for 1 or 2 well‑bounded use cases. Scale after you prove value.
  • Skipping data plumbing. Even small wins require clean data and permissions. Start with the systems you control.
  • No owner, no outcome. Assign a process owner who commits to the KPI. Make the improvement part of their scorecard.

When to bring in help

If you want structure, start with an Agentic AI Assessment to identify the top 3–5 opportunities with quantified ROI in ~3 weeks. For fast proof, Agentic AI Innovation delivers a working prototype in under a month. When you are ready to scale, Agentic AI Production teams launch enterprise-ready agents with the right UX, integrations, quality engineering, and guardrails. The goal is working software, in production, tied to business outcomes.

Underneath all of this is a simple belief: software remains the fastest way to create lasting business value when it is aligned to outcomes and delivered with quality. AI just raises the ceiling on what is possible.

Close

Mid‑market and enterprise leaders do not need a grand AI vision to get started. You need a small set of well‑chosen wins that pay for themselves, build confidence, and teach your teams how to operate with AI in the loop. From there, you can decide how far and how fast to go.

The AI revolution is here. The question isn’t whether to participate. It’s whether you’ll be able to turn your AI investment into measurable business value. Let’s make sure you’re in the 5% that fully succeed. Schedule a conversation with our AI strategists to map your quick win strategy. The best time to start was six months ago. The second-best time is today.

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