The era of AI agents has officially begun. Making way for them, NVIDIA chief Jensen Huang predicted that in the future, an organisation’s IT department would evolve into an ‘HR department for AI’. It would be responsible for onboarding, managing, and maintaining a new generation of AI agents.
At the ongoing Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2025, Huang said, “In a lot of ways, the IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future. Today, they manage and maintain a bunch of software from the IT industry; in the future, they will maintain, nurture, onboard, and improve a whole bunch of digital agents and provision them to the companies to use.”
He added that these AI agents will work along with human employees, offering unprecedented capabilities in automation and efficiency across industries. Speaking to a captivated audience, Huang explained how specialised AI agents will become integral to companies, performing tasks ranging from customer service to complex problem-solving.
“AI agents are a multi-trillion dollar opportunity,” he said.
“Jensen Huang’s CES 2025 keynote wasn’t just about breakthroughs—it was a glimpse into how AI agents will shape the future. From physical AI that reasons, plans, and acts, to tools like Cosmos and Project DIGITS, NVIDIA is building the foundation for AI agents to integrate seamlessly into our lives and industries,” said RagaAI founder Gaurav Agarwal.
Far away at the Microsoft AI Tour in Bengaluru, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella said that “building agents should be as simple as creating a spreadsheet”. He introduced a no-code platform called Copilot Studio that allows users to create new agents based on their needs.
“Think of AI as a co-pilot for your work. It’s the UI for AI,” Nadella said, illustrating the role it will play as an interface between employees and the AI. He gave the example of an AI agent in a healthcare setting, describing a scenario where a doctor prepares for a tumour board meeting, and the AI creates the agenda, prioritises cases, and takes detailed notes during the discussion.
Nadella also unveiled Copilot Actions, which allows users to create cross-application workflows that connect people, data, and tasks across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
Likewise, OpenAI chief Sam Altman recently predicted that AI agents could enter the workforce by 2025. “We believe that, by 2025, we may see the first AI agents join the workforce and materially change the output of companies,” Altman wrote in a recent blog post.
Meanwhile, Google published a comprehensive whitepaper exploring the development and functionality of AI agents. Last December, the company launched Gemini 2, which it said will have agentic capabilities.
Too Soon?
Google’s senior product manager, Logan Kilpatrick, feels that it will take at least another year before AI agents become a reality. “2025 is the year of AI vision capabilities going mainstream; 2026 will be agents,” he said.
“There’s a ~12-month capabilities-to-wide-scale-production gap. Most vision use cases work now but aren’t widely deployed. Agents still need a little more work for billion-user-level scale,” Kilpatrick added.
According to a recent report, it could take OpenAI some time to launch AI agents. This is because the company is concerned about prompt injection, a type of attack where a large language model is tricked into following instructions from a malicious user.
Huang may be right. It looks like the primary responsibility of enterprise IT teams will be to ensure that the agents are safe to use and do not have access to data they are not supposed to have.
In an interview with AIM, Okta customer identity CTO Bhawna Singh spoke about the growing need to authorise AI agents. “A platform is needed to handle both authentication and authorisation, making sure not all data is accessible to the agent,” she said.
She explained that since these AI agents interact with each other, it is essential that they have the right data access. “We need to make sure these agents are verified,” she said.
Similarly, NVIDIA NeMo is helping companies onboard and train their AI agents, mimicking the process of onboarding a new employee. “Nemo is essentially a digital employee pipeline where companies can provide feedback, define company-specific vocabulary, and set guardrails on the behaviour of these agents,” Huang explained.
Recently, AI startup Composio launched AgentAuth, a product that efficiently integrates AI agents with third-party tools and APIs. It supports a variety of authentication protocols, including OAuth 2.0, OAuth 1.0, API keys, JWT, and Basic Authentication.
The platform also integrates over 250 widely used apps and services, catering to diverse needs such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems and ticketing platforms.
“The biggest problem that people face while building agents is connecting them to reliable tools. For example, if someone builds a sales agent, they would need to connect it with CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot, etc,” said Karan Vaidya, Composio chief, in an exclusive interview with AIM.
Vertical AI Agents
The AI agents market, valued at $5.1 billion in 2024, is projected to soar to $47.1 billion by 2030. Just as companies today rely on SaaS services, in the near future, they will hire specialised AI agents to meet their needs. Employees will widely use autonomous agents to perform tasks like attending meetings, making summaries, drafting emails, and translating meetings live.
“The early winners in LLM-based solutions might just be general-purpose platforms. Over time, vertical AI agents will emerge. It’s like how, in the box software world, the early vendors were just trying to convince people to use software… As the market matures, it will get more sophisticated, and vertical solutions will become dominant players,” said Jared Friedman, group partner at Y Combinator, in a recent podcast with YC president Gary Tan.
Salesforce chief Marc Benioff describes AI agents as digital labour. “I am the CEO of a company that manages agents and humans, and I have a digital labour platform at my disposal to augment my support, sales, service, and marketing,” said Benioff.
In India, Freshworks unveiled a new version of Freddy AI, an autonomous agent that resolved 45% of customer support requests and 40% of IT service requests (in beta).
However, as AI agents become increasingly common, selecting the right sectors for their implementation will be crucial. “Departments such as sales, marketing, and finance usually have well-established software systems like CRM, ERP, analytics dashboards, etc., so they can plug AI agents directly into these data pipelines,” said Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, director of AI research at Zoho and ManageEngine.
Besides SaaS companies, several Indian startups are also building AI agents. Bengaluru-based AI startup KOGO AI, founded by Praveer Kochhar and Raj K Gopalakrishnan, is developing AI agents and solutions to simplify workflows and improve productivity for businesses. The company recently launched an AI agent store.“We are currently building an agent that can look at a database and actually think like a data scientist or a business analyst, generating extremely intelligent questions,” Kochhar said in a recent podcast with AIM.
