11/07/2025, 08:19 Answering the Top Trending AI Agent Questions, Part 3: Getting Started

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Answering the Top Trending AI Agent

Questions, Part 3: Getting Started
3 June 2025 - ID G00834564 - 11 min read

By Leinar Ramos, Ben Yan, and 9 more

TOPICS

Shape AI Strategy Future Direction for GenAI Emerging HR Technologies and Trends

Given their potential business impact, AI agents have become one of the most
discussed trends in technology. This research can help AI leaders answer the key
questions on selecting use cases and technologies and getting started on their AI agent
journey.

Overview

Key Findings

The most successful AI agent pilots focus on demonstrating business potential, not
on technical feasibility. Organizations tend to run technical pilots that simply
demonstrate that it is possible to create or use AI agents in their workflows, instead
of testing how this technology can add considerable business value to their
organizations.

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While there are emerging use cases across various industries and business functions,
most are still in the experimental or research phase, with only a few in actual
production. AI agents are not a one-size-fits-all solution. Most AI use cases do not
need an AI agent and can be addressed with more mature technologies. Other use
cases are too complex and risky for the current AI agent technology.

There is a continuum of buy-to-build choices for organizations, from prebuilt agents

to no-code agent builders, agent-development platforms and AI agent training
platforms. AI Leaders struggle to navigate this complex product landscape.

Recommendations

Implement a pilot cycle for AI integration by prioritizing use cases, forming diverse
teams to decide on buy-versus-build strategies, designing top-priority cases and
continually assessing their value impact to make informed stop-refine-continue
decisions.

Prioritize low-risk pilot use cases that yield tangible business outcomes to guide
future investments and broader rollouts, while involving business subject matter
experts to maintain a focus on value and ensure seamless AI integration into current
workflows.

Determine the optimal buy-to-build strategy for each AI agent use case by selecting
prebuilt agents or no-code builders for quick experimentation in common scenarios
and leveraging agent development platforms for complex, custom workflows.

Introduction
There has been a rapid surge of interest in AI agents. Gartner saw a 750% increase in AI-
agent-related inquiries between the second and fourth quarter of 2024. This is driven by
technology progress but also by increased market hype.

AI leaders will face increased pressure to separate the hype from reality, understand AI
agents and their limitations and risks, and learn how to begin taking advantage of these
emerging technologies. A lack of clear understanding and focus on realistic business
opportunities and outcomes will lead organizations to make the wrong investments and
unnecessary failed projects.
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11/07/2025, 08:19 Answering the Top Trending AI Agent Questions, Part 3: Getting Started

This research is the third in a four-part series on the top trending AI agent questions
(see Table 1).

Table 1: Top Trending AI Agent Questions Enlarge Table

Research Note Questions Covered Link to Research

Part 1: What are AI agents? Answering the Top Trending

Foundational AI Agent Questions, Part 1:
What is the difference
Knowledge between AI agents and Foundational Knowledge

agentic AI?

What is the difference

between AI agents and
AI assistants?

What are the core

building blocks of AI
agents?

Part 2: Current Do AI agents require an Answering the Top Trending

State of AI LLM? AI Agent Questions, Part 2:
Agents Current State of AI Agents
What are the current
challenges and
limitations of AI agents?

Source: Gartner

This research will help AI leaders answer the top questions around starting their journey
with AI agents.

Top Questions on Getting Started With AI Agents

How do I pilot AI agents?

What are the best use cases to get started with AI agents?

What are the technologies I can use to deliver AI agents?

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Analysis

How Do I Pilot AI Agents?

Back to top questions

The most successful pilots focus on demonstrating business potential, not technical
feasibility. Organizations tend to run technical pilots that simply demonstrate that it is
possible to buy AI agents or build them into existing systems and workflows, leading to
only incremental improvements and ignoring the technology’s transformative potential.

Your AI agent pilot should not be about

proving that the technology works, but
rather, about learning how AI agents can
add real business value in your organization.

AI leaders need a systematic way to navigate the wide range of opportunities. They
must find and prioritize a few of the most promising areas where agents can help within
their organizations and run a pilot to quickly deliver and validate these ideas in practice,
testing their business value and cost assumptions (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: AI Agents Pilot Cycle

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AI agent pilots can follow the steps detailed in Table 2.

Table 2: AI Agent Pilot Steps Enlarge Table

Step Description

Step 1: Focus on low-risk, valuable use cases, as opposed to

Ideate and transformational initiatives, to learn about both the potential
prioritize and the challenges of the technology.

Engage cross-functional experts to map out organizational

processes and identify time-intensive tasks that would benefit
from the flexible automation that comes from AI agents.

Prioritize only a few use-case ideas by ranking them according

to their business value and feasibility.

Step 2: Build Gather a team of AI experts, software engineers and business

a team subject matter experts to work on the pilot.

Ensure that the team can quickly iterate the agent design (if
building) and integrate it into business workflows.

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Charge the team with educating the organization on the

specific new risks inherent in AI agents.

Source: Gartner

What Are the Best Use Cases for AI Agents?

Back to top questions

AI agents are not the best fit for the majority of AI use cases. There are three types of
use cases according to their relative complexity:

AI agents are an overkill: These are use cases with low complexity, where a fixed
sequence of steps is enough, and no dynamic planning is required. These are good
candidates for more mature technologies like traditional automation, software
engineering or even a linear sequence of LLM calls.

AI agent sweet spot: These are use cases with medium complexity where the tasks
and/or environments are too dynamic for a fixed sequence of steps, requiring the
dynamic planning of AI agents. With these use cases, the cost of errors is low, which
reduces the impact of the reliability challenges in current AI agents.

AI agents are not ready: These are use cases with high complexity and risk, for
which current AI agent technology is not yet ready, given reliability and other
challenges.

See Figure 2 for an illustration of these three categories.

Figure 2: The AI Agent Sweet Spot

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AI agents are not one-size-fits-all solutions.

Most AI use cases do not need an AI agent.

AI agents represent an emerging trend, and use cases are being explored at the
moment. A lot of implementations remain in pilot and have not made it to production.
In a recent Gartner webinar on AI agents, only 6% of the audience agreed that they had
1
deployed AI agents in production.

Table 3 lists emerging use cases for AI agents, most of which are at the experimentation
phase and not yet put into production.

Table 3: AI Agent Use Cases Enlarge Table

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11/07/2025, 08:19 Answering the Top Trending AI Agent Questions, Part 3: Getting Started

decision making, with roles like decision model designer and

decision executor (see Market Guide for Decision Intelligence
Platforms).

Sales AI sales prospecting agents help automate repetitive sales

tasks, including creating personalized outbound emails,
responding and qualifying inbound leads, and scheduling
meetings (see Innovation Insight: AI SDR Agents for Inbound
and Outbound Sales Communication).

Marketing Personalize customer messaging and automating campaigns,

tailoring content and optimizing ad targeting. By automating
routine tasks and providing insights, AI agents enhance
marketing efficiency and effectiveness.

Software AI agents in software engineering step beyond AI code

engineering assistants to act as autonomous autopilots for software
Source: Gartner

What Are the Technologies I Can Use to Build and Deliver

AI Agents?

Back to top questions

There is a continuum of buy-to-build choices for organizations, ranging from prebuilt

agents to no-code agent builders, agent-development platforms and AI agent training
platforms. These require different skillsets (see Figure 3 and Innovation Insight for the AI
Agent Platforms Landscape).

Figure 3: Emerging AI Agent Landscape

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The four main alternatives are:

Prebuilt agents: There is a rapidly growing ecosystem of prebuilt agents that

organizations can directly use, ranging from general productivity agents, task-
specific agents, business-function-specific agents, to industry-specific vertical
agents. These can often be configured to some degree, but they are positioned to be
used directly by business users without requiring technical expertise.

No-code agent builders: These are SaaS-delivered products that offer an integrated
environment to build, publish and manage AI-powered agents without using any
coding. They are used primarily by business technologists, such as citizen
developers and citizen data scientists. They can build agents in a no-code way to
improve individual productivity, standardize business workflows and drive more
autonomous operations.

Agent development platforms: These platforms enable developers to create and

manage AI agents through code, configuration and metadata, offering flexibility and
control for implementing complex logic and integrations. They encompass both new
AI agent frameworks and existing platforms like conversational AI platforms,
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business orchestration and automation technologies, RPA and others that are now
offering agentic AI capabilities.

Agent training platforms: These platforms enable AI experts to train AI agents,

including their underlying AI models, to perform specific tasks. They enable a higher
degree of customization than what is possible in the building of AI agents by
assembling pretrained AI components.

Choose the right AI agent deployment

option for your use case, not necessarily the
one that’s most complex or advanced.

Select the best-fit buy-to-build approach for each AI agent use case. Choose prebuilt
agents or no-code agent builders for quick experimentation in well-defined, common
use cases. Explore agent development platforms for more complex, custom workflows.

Evidence

Related Topics
Coordinate AI Delivery and Execution Design and Engineer AI Systems

Develop Resources and Assets for AI

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