This is the year of AI agents.

The last few months of 2024 brought much talk about and expectations for AI agents that can operate autonomously and semi-autonomously. Many vendors have capitalized on the enthusiasm to introduce new agentic products: Salesforce came out with Agentforce, and Microsoft introduced Copilot agents.

With 2025 here, questions about whether the momentum on agents will continue. Some see the agentic hype, and real progress, persisting this year.

Craig Le Clair, a Forrester Research analyst and author of the soon-to-be-published book Random Acts of Automation, is among those who think AI agents will continue to gain momentum in the new year.

"It's the biggest change toward AGI [artificial general intelligence] that I've seen," Le Clair said on the latest episode of Informa TechTarget's Targeting AI podcast, referring to the concept of AI that is as smart or smarter than human intelligence.

Enterprises will likely adjust the ways they use applications that use AI agents as copilots to augment humans, because many of those applications are not profitable, he said. However, AI agents will be the driving force in helping enterprises build platforms that use generative AI technology to spur business value, he said.

"When you really start to turn piles of data into conversations with people ... that's the opportunity for this," Le Clair said. "For an employee to have a conversation with standard operating procedures to get advice on what to do, or for standard operating procedures to be taken out of that PDF repository and actually put into a prompt and generate tasks that are then followed by an agent to get something done -- the potential is really there."

As with all new technology, AI agents involve a trust issue. Enterprises still do not trust the technology to be fully autonomous and perform tasks from start to finish all on its own, Le Clair said.

However, organizations can rely on AI agents to perform part of the work with the assistance of a human in the loop.

With the speed of the technology's maturation, progress toward fully autonomous agents by 2028 is likely, Le Clair predicted.

Esther Shittu is an Informa TechTarget news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems. Shaun Sutner is senior news director for Informa TechTarget's information management team, driving coverage of artificial intelligence, unified communications, analytics and data management technologies. Together, they host the Targeting AI podcast series.

The AI application startup, which was founded in 2016 and was valued at more than $2.1 billion in 2021, uses a reasoning engine to help employees search for information across the enterprise.

Since its inception, a key ingredient in the company's success has been AI and generative AI technology.

"We were the first company after Google to deploy BERT in production," said co-founder and president Varun Singh on the latest episode of Informa TechTarget's Targeting AI podcast.

BERT was Google's first model with bidirectional encoding that enabled computers to understand large text spans. It was pretrained, so Moveworks did not have to train it from the ground up. It also did not require a lot of data.

After using BERT to train its automation platform, Moveworks started using GPT-2 from OpenAI in 2020. This is two years before the mass popularization of the generative AI vendor's ChatGPT chatbot, mostly to generate synthetic data.

Singh added that he and his team had failed to realize right away that the model could also be used for reasoning tasks.

"It's not so much a mistake that was made or not, but it was just sort of as technology evolved, the moment a paradigm shift actually comes into full focus, you look back and you're like, 'We could have done that sooner because we had access to the models, but we didn't see how powerful they could be,'" he said.

Since the shift, Moveworks has evolved from a platform with a reasoning engine to a platform for building AI agents.

On Oct. 1, Moveworks launched Agentic Automation as part of its Creator Studio offering. The system enables developers to build AI agents.

Throughout the evolution of its business, Moveworks has differentiated itself with its use of AI technology, Singh said.

"Without AI, there's nothing Moveworks has to offer to the world," he said. "There's only value from Moveworks because of AI."

Esther Ajao is a TechTarget Editorial news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems. Shaun Sutner is senior news director for TechTarget Editorial's information management team, driving coverage of artificial intelligence, unified communications, analytics and data management technologies. Together, they host the Targeting AI podcast series.

When generative AI became the next big thing in tech, enterprise software giant Oracle bet heavily on a startup to provide it with foundation and large language models rather than scramble to develop its own.

That then-fledgling company was Cohere. Founded in 2019, the generative AI vendor raised $270 million in a Series C round, and its investors included Oracle, Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures, and some private equity firms. In July, Cohere raised another $500 million and reached a market valuation of $5.5 billion.

Cohere's open generative AI technology is now infused in many of Oracle's databases, a fixture among large enterprises. The tech giant has also tapped Cohere's powerful and scalable Control-R model for Oracle's popular vertical market applications, including those for finance, supply chain and human capital management.

But while Oracle has put Cohere at the center of its generative AI and agentic AI strategy, the tech giant is also working closely with Meta.

The social media colossus has gained a foothold in the enterprise AI market with its Llama family of open foundation models. Oracle is customizing Llama for its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform, along with Cohere's models.

"We have made a decision to really partner deeply around the foundation models," said Greg Pavlik, executive vice president, AI and data management services at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, on the Targeting AI podcast from TechTarget Editorial.

"What we're looking for are companies that are experienced with creating high-quality generative AI models," he continued. "But more importantly … companies that are interested in enterprise and specifically business solutions."

Pavlik said Oracle values the open architecture of the models from both Cohere and Meta, which makes it easier for Oracle to customize and fine-tune them for enterprise applications.

"The advantage really of having a deep partnership is that we're able to sit down with the foundation model providers and look at the evolution of the models themselves, because they're not really static," he said. "A company will create a model and then they'll continually retrain it.

"We see our role as to come in and proxy for the enterprise user, proxy for a number of verticals," Pavlik continued. "And then try to move the state of the art in the technology base closer and closer to the kinds of patterns and the kinds of scenarios that are important for enterprise users."

Oracle also uses generative AI technology from other vendors and enables its customers to use other third-party models, he noted.

Shaun Sutner is senior news director for TechTarget Editorial's information management team, driving coverage of artificial intelligence, analytics and data management technologies. Esther Ajao is a TechTarget Editorial news writer and podcast host covering AI software and systems. Together, they host the Targeting AI podcast.