Big risk, big reward: Herein lies the rub: AI experts see huge potential advantages with autonomous AI, with the possibility of creating huge workplace efficiencies, but the risks are substantial.Riley acknowledges both security concerns and the potential for agentic AI to take actions that users didn’t anticipate. While users haven’t yet seen autonomous AI able to complete work faster or cheaper than humans, tokens are expensive, the technology has the potential to remake the nature of work for the better, he says.”When you talk about the advantages, it’s definitely replacing the work that happens today, but almost that’s a byproduct,” he says. “What it actually enables you to do is coordinate in a different way than you did before with the passing of information back and forth across the team to get those things out faster, with better quality.”Autonomous AIs will allow organizations to redeploy their human workforces to new tasks, removing much of the drudgery work, advocates say.”Once you can start trusting a lot of these agentic systems to take the responsibility for things, often it’s not doing it faster or even better than what the human does,” Riley says. “What it does is it doesn’t require the human to be involved, which means they can work on other things.”Many companies are still early in the autonomous AI journey, says Upal Saha, CTO at AI data integration provider bem. One of the big challenges is getting the AIs to understand how the business operates, he says.”Inside most companies, the relationships between processes, data, and decisions aren’t documented cleanly,” he adds. “That knowledge lives across teams and individuals. Agents can be incredibly capable, but without that operational context they’re often guessing rather than executing.”Speed is a huge potential advantage of autonomous agents, but it’s also one of the downsides, Saha notes.”If they have the right context, they can compress hours of manual operational work into seconds,” he adds. “The downside is that the same speed can amplify mistakes. If an agent misunderstands a workflow or data structure, it can repeat that mistake at scale.”Despite the risks, the market is shifting quickly toward agentic AI, with large-scale adoptions coming in the next two years, says Russell Twilligear, head of AI R&D at AI-generated content provider BlogBuster.”We are witnessing a shift from systems that only generate text towards systems that can actually execute multi-step work,” he says. “The biggest advantage is that autonomous agents don’t just answer a simple prompt. They can move from intent to execution by gathering information, updating systems, etc.”However, there’s a danger if autonomous agents are implemented incorrectly, Twilligear adds.”The biggest disadvantage is that this is going to scale faster than we can control it,” he says. “That means security risks and misfires on every new integration.”Security and oversight are the major problems to overcome, he adds. “When an agent can access email, files, browsers, etc., you are opening a world of hurt,” Twilligear says. “The problem is how fast all of this is happening. Recent security reporting shows that a lot of companies don’t even have monitoring over their AI agents. To me, that is just wild.”
Allow experimentation: IT leaders deploying autonomous agents need to put robust controls in place, ensure that their data is clean and accessible, and their app permissions are correctly configured, The Adaptavist Group’s Riley says.Despite security and output concerns, Riley encourages IT leaders to allow employees to experiment with the emerging technology because of the impending adoption. Organizations that invest in AI training and allow employees to play with the technology tend to get better results from deployments, he notes.”With all of these tools that are available, people should be trying right now to just understand how they work,” he says. “These things are coming out so fast that the onboarding and the sort of enablement you would have gotten in IT software 10 years ago just simply isn’t there. Everyone’s approach to this is, just go play with it, and you’ll figure out how it works.”See also:
What CISOs need to know about the OpenClaw security nightmareYour personal OpenClaw agent may also be taking orders from malicious websitesAgentic AI: A CISO’s security nightmare in the making?Think agentic AI is hard to secure today? Just wait a few monthsAgentic AI in IT security: Where expectations meet reality
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