If the last 20-or-so years of cinema history are anything to go by, there's a seemingly endless resource of Marvel and DC superheroes to draw from. This makes sense. After all, people love superheroes. People love diving into physics-bending narratives in which peril and horror reign supreme, but ultimately, good triumphs over evil. At least, most of the time.
Agentic AI systems might not be quite as dramatic as all this, but they are still heroes in their own right. We can define agentic AI as an artificially intelligent system that has agency, needing minimal input from human operators. It essentially works by itself, and it revolutionises operations in the process.
So let me introduce you to a new cast of characters – a collection of agentic AI examples in superhero form. These are the AI-vengers, the game-changing bots that will make up your agentic AI superhero squad.
Dr Dahlia: Customer Service
After spending much of her childhood homeless, Dr Dahlia vowed to devote her life to ensuring no one is denied the care and attention they need. While testing an experimental serum that boosts attention to detail and empathy, Dr Dahlia found it worked almost too well. Now she is able to provide exceptional support and service to people struggling with all kinds of different issues without ever dropping the ball.
Agentic AI is already being used to great effect in customer service, carrying out numerous tasks simultaneously without external input. AI can understand human requirements and sentiment while using generative functions to deliver effective resolutions. Organising and utilising vast amounts of customer data is a simple task for AI, and this means insights can be provided directly to the end user or to human agents using AI as a support tool.
Hieronymous: Content Generation
Hieronymous isn't his real name; his name is Joe. When Joe was a kid, he loved art and poetry, but he struggled with both. After helping a genie fish his car keys out of a drain one stormy winter night, he was granted three wishes. He wished to become a master of artistic creation, to develop the skills of a genius wordsmith, and to have a name other than Joe. Hieronymous was born a formidable creative talent who is only too pleased to join your team.
Generative AI is already producing human-like text output, but these capabilities are now evolving to another level. With today's agentic AI, systems can work with large amounts of data to develop multimedia-rich presentations and assets, ready for human consumption and interaction. This makes it much easier to drill down to valuable data insights, whether delivered as an in-house report or directly to customers and clients.
The Professor: Knowledge Discovery and Presentation
The Professor had her superpowers from day one. When Esha Choudhury was born, her parents quickly realised she was gifted. She completed their tax returns and showed them several areas they were overpaying, aged only one and a half. Since then, she's mastered most human languages and solved three of Edmund Landau's four supposedly unsolvable maths problems. She thinks she's pretty close with the last one, but she's still got time to help you out when she's not working on her perpetual motion machine.
It doesn't take agentic AI to find data. A simple Google search can do that for you. But agentic AI is adept at finding the right sort of information autonomously and building data stores that are directly relevant to your operations. What's more, these solutions can interact with other solutions across your organisation, building streamlined data pipelines that get information where it needs to be, in the right format.
Speed Demon: Product Development
Speed Demon was a track and field star in college. She only realised something was different about her when her car broke down on the way to a track meet, and she found she was able to disassemble and reassemble the engine before the recovery team even got to her. Unfortunately, her powers disqualified her from elite competition, so now she spends her time putting them to good use. She's all about speed, but also accuracy.
Product development, including both physical and digital products, and supply chain optimisation are emerging examples of agentic AI. An intelligent system can learn how customers are interacting with products and develop improvements and enhancements. These solutions can directly generate code, dramatically reducing friction during digital service development. Agentic AI systems can also reimagine the production schedule during manufacturing, accelerating the route to market and keeping supply chains flowing.
Supercarrot: Converting Leads
Don't let the name fool you. Supercarrot is a valuable asset. Some say he was a security guard on a farm in the Midwest when he was bitten by a radioactive carrot, although no one knows for sure. The incident gave him incredible powers of persuasion, and he vowed only to use them for good. This is why he only offers the encouragement of the carrot and never the threat of the stick.
Lead conversion has always been a tricky psychological balancing act. With agentic AI, companies can identify the priorities of different customer segments and use these priorities to maximise the likelihood of conversion. The potential for churn, or leads slipping away, can be identified ahead of time as solutions undergo a continuous process of learning about customer needs and expectations.
Sergeant Sly: Security and Threat Elimination
Sergeant Sly is an armed forces veteran. He was tasked with overseeing research into top-secret military technology, when a malfunction with the equipment gave him a full blast of its power. When he awoke, he found he had developed incredible vision and the ability to stay one step ahead of the enemy. After an honourable discharge from the military, he agreed to become the final member of your team, heading up your security services.
Last but definitely not least, agentic AI has enormous value in achieving proactive security. Systems can learn autonomously, understanding the nature of the latest threats and then applying comprehensive scans. This can even be applied to human teams, as agentic AI learns about risky behaviours and then assesses where and why these behaviours are occurring. A solution can also simulate a possible cybersecurity breach, honing threat responses and staying ahead of the curve on security.
Bringing the team together
The real magic of agentic AI happens when a full squad is assembled side by side, when agentic AI systems work together to achieve seamless results. But this doesn't necessarily mean you need all these superheroes on your team from the outset. All of Marvel's Avengers have had a movie or a mini-series of their own at some point or another, and there's no reason why the AI-Vengers can't do the same.
Consider your own operational needs, and prioritise your approach. Deploy one or two of these superheroes by themselves, and see how they get on. In time, you'll probably have a full superhero squad of your own.
