When the 10Fold team walked the Ai4 Vegas show floor this year, it validated what everyone has seen through conversations in media and between business leaders: the present and future of AI is agentic. And as the momentum grows, the pressure for SaaS providers to put forward an “agentic” solution is on to keep pace with fierce industry competition.
At the same time, enterprise buyers are still deciding how this new AI can operate in their business, while growing savvy to the technology’s limitations. They’ve seen emerging research around agentic AI’s limitations, like Gartner’s new research predicting that 40% of agentic projects will fail. But the commitment to agentic technologies remains, as PwC found 88% of senior executives plan to increase AI-related budgets due to agentic AI.
This potent combination of opportunity, capital, skepticism, and speed of development leaves companies in a bind. The AI agent market is saturated, and competition is fierce. Meanwhile buyers outside tech are still trying to get their arms around what an agent does, and the “crying need” they meaningfully address, as skepticism escalates. We see it in public relations, too – the reporters we work with often wade through hundreds of pitches about agentic AI tools or solutions each day. Like enterprise buyers, they also must understand what makes a new product meaningfully different or new, and they need proof that it can stand up to thoughtful skepticism.
To thrive in these conditions, brands must build storylines that both educate and differentiate.
What Makes an AI Agent?
Market research reports agree that AI agents are part of the future of enterprise. However, this growth potential comes with healthy skepticism and ambiguity. As more AI agent pilots fail in proof-of-concept or fail to live up to marketing hype, it’s time to get tangible. Brands must demonstrate the validity of their new agents to support unmet business needs, define their exact function for the end user, and articulate how it will change their working experience.
Brands cannot provide this answer without a baseline definition of the business problem they target and how AI agent technology specifically solves it. To stand out in the market, the business problem you address must require functions distinct to agents. This calls for a clear, shared definition of AI agents to ensure your teams and the customers they support clearly understand what qualifies as an AI agent. For brand health, we recommend adopting a more rigorous definition that highlights an agent’s ability to act autonomously. According to Gartner, agents must act autonomously, with the ability to understand a goal, assess conditions necessary to achieve the goal, and execute against it. This differentiates AI agents from other tools like automated workflows, while articulating how they distinctly meet a business need and providing clarity to balance against rising skepticism towards AI agents – in part powered by unclear marketing.
Workshopping Your Agent Superpower
Once paired with a strong definition, brands must identify their AI agent’s superpower – and what differentiates it from the steep competition – through tangible language and examples. Questions to help you distill what looks and feels different about your AI agent include:
Question 1: What is the business problem, and why do enterprises need an AI agent to solve it?
Technology is a tool. For it to generate value, it needs to address a need that requires support from a tool – and for AI agents in particular the solution is most differentiated when it addresses a business problem that only an agent can solve. Successful brands will identify “crying needs” in the business world that other solutions failed to address (like complex skills gaps or the time required for human-powered data analysis. They’ll pair this challenge with an agent shaped by a definition that’s both rigorous and focused on the actual functions the AI will perform. This connects your agent to a known business need without an established solution and allows you to tangibly explain how an AI agent technology is distinctly able to address it.
Question 2: How do you differentiate yourself from others in the market, and why is your differentiation sustainable?
When AI agents from different providers compete to perform similar tasks, it may be time to look at what has and will continue to set your technology apart. While enterprise buying cycles have accelerated to try and match the speed of AI development, they remain constrained by financial and operational parameters that make these decisions challenging. To stand out in the crowd today, ask how a user’s experience with your agent is meaningfully different from the competition. Does it shine through in the user interface? Deep customer collaboration? Higher benchmark performance? From there – demonstrate how you will maintain this differentiator over the long term. Have you paired a standout technology with heavy ongoing R&D investment? Reworked the customer service pipeline to truly tailor solutions and support? An attention-grabbing gimmick may get you in the door, but it won’t close the deal.
Question 3: What value will the agent deliver against the business problem?
Abstract “value” is hard to sell at a tangible cost. As you articulate and share your brand’s distinct process toward developing an AI agent, you must also describe how an end-user’s day will change with the tool. Keep it physical and keep it simple. Will an end user kiss expense reporting goodbye? Reliably analyze customer data faster than they can bake a cake? Quickly identify changes or anomalies they’d usually spend hours scouring code to fix? The more tangible the value (especially if characterized in specific cost or time savings, the more successful your agent will be. Answering this question may require you to look beyond your own organization too – industry analysts, influencers and even early customers can provide valuable feedback and goes along way towards articulating your AI agent’s distinct value proposition in the market.
Break Through Marketing, Tell a Real Story
B2B technology marketers are familiar with the challenge of making abstract into a tangible product, and that’s vital in the already-saturated AI agent market. You can’t expect customers to differentiate between concepts with no form. It’s our job as communicators to provide that form through clear definitions, and real examples that place technology in the context of a customer’s firsthand experience.
It’s going to take time for people to tease out the why’s, what’s, and when’s, for AI agent deployment in the enterprises. Through real storytelling that differentiates technology with tangibility, brands can meet these questions with answers.