As enterprises push toward intelligent autonomy, Agentic AI is fast emerging as the next evolution in enterprise intelligence. In this exclusive interview, Ravi Iyer, Senior Director of Software Engineering, India at New Relic, shares his perspective on how Agentic AI is reshaping workflows across industries, from finance to healthcare and manufacturing.
Q: How do you see the rise of Agentic AI, and what sets it apart from conventional AI in enterprise cases?
A: The rise of Agentic AI marks a pivotal shift from AI that analyzes or creates, to AI that acts. What truly sets it apart is its proactive, goal-oriented autonomy. Conventional AI, including ML, excels at narrow, reactive tasks like identifying patterns in data or making predictions. Generative AI, like ChatGPT, is a powerful content creator that responds to prompts but cannot take independent action. Both require direct human instruction to initiate a task.
Agentic AI, in contrast, is designed to achieve a high-level goal with minimal supervision. It can perceive its digital environment, reason through a problem, formulate a multi-step plan, use tools like APIs to interact with other systems, and execute that plan autonomously. It moves beyond simply performing a task to taking ownership of an entire workflow.
Q: Which major verticals (businesses) are leading the adoption of Agentic AI and why?
A: The adoption of Agentic AI is being led by industries with complex, data-heavy, and multi-step processes. The primary verticals are Financial Services, Healthcare, Retail & Customer Service, and Supply Chain & Manufacturing. The driving factor in each is the potential to move beyond simple task automation to orchestrating entire end-to-end workflows, unlocking significant efficiency.
Financial Services is driven by the need for high-speed, autonomous risk management, and compliance monitoring.
Healthcare adoption is fueled by the desire to alleviate the immense administrative burden on clinicians, automating workflows like patient scheduling and billing.
Retail and Customer Service aim to deliver hyper-personalized experiences and resolve complex support issues at scale.
Supply Chain and Manufacturing seek resilience and dynamic optimization, using agents to manage inventory and reroute logistics in real-time.
Q: What cybersecurity risks or governance concerns do you foresee with Agentic AI deployments?
A: Given that Agentic AI is quite early on the maturity curve, unexpected behavior in production like the case of an AI App builder deleting a company’s production database can create a significant confidence barrier and increase risk.
The primary governance concerns are accountability and goal misalignment. When an autonomous system causes harm, determining who is responsible—the developer, the organization, or the user—is a profound challenge. Furthermore, an agent given a poorly defined goal may pursue it with ruthless efficiency, leading to unintended consequences, even without a technical bug.
Q: One piece of advice you’d offer to CIOs/CTOs planning to integrate Agentic AI into their digital roadmap?
A: The single most important piece of advice is to start with a narrow, high-impact business workflow, not a broad, technology-first experiment. Ambitious, large-scale projects are highly prone to failure due to rising costs, unclear ROI, and the immaturity of the technology.
Instead of trying to build a universal "AI brain," identify a specific, well-understood, and painful business process. Ideal candidates are high-volume, repeatable workflows like IT ticket resolution, accounts payable processing, or new-hire onboarding. Deploying an agent to automate a single, bounded workflow de-risks the investment, demonstrates clear and measurable value to the business, and builds the crucial organizational trust and momentum needed for future, more complex initiatives.
Leader Uncovered:
Education: MS Engg from University of Missouri - Columbia
Birth Place: Mumbai, India
First Job: i2 Technologies
Biggest inspiration: Brad D Smith, ex-CEO of Intuit and President of Marshall University, W Virginia
Passion/Hobby: Running
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