Sema4.ai Delivers Agents of Change
The pace of innovation in AI is moving at light speed, so it was only a small surprise recently when Antti Karjalainen shared his company’s vision beyond large language models (LLMs).
“So what is an agent? It's a piece of software that, contrasting to traditional software that we've been used to, does not just make you more efficient at your work. Agents will actually complete the work for you. So think about them as sort of a knowledge worker or software that can reason, collaborate and act with humans.”
Antti went on to explain that what we’ve seen with generative AI is just the beginning, and it’s in the application of these models, in his view with agents, that the real transformation of our industries and society will start taking shape.
What Sema4 is delivering is fascinating in terms of its broad reach across industries and the disruptive productivity it places in the hands of human collaborators. In Sema4’s vision, each individual can be unleashed with unlimited AI workers that can research, reason, and deliver task work, freeing the human for more value-added work. At first blush, this vision looks similar to Microsoft co-Pilot. But upon further analysis, it’s more optimized for unique industries or business processes. Antti explained the difference, being that “the AI agent is something that you can actually interact with to get a full work product done.”
“Instead of just assisting on the side, an AI agent is kind of the main thing. An AI agent is going to be a new way to interact with enterprise applications, whereas a co-pilot is more of an additive layer on top,” he said.
When you consider the autonomy in this statement, you can start understanding the power that agents represent to autonomous control of digital functions holistically and start imagining the complexity of delivering this level of control to the enterprise. The team certainly has the technology chops and enterprise awareness to deliver the goods with far-ranging backgrounds from tech leaders including AWS, Cloudera, Docker, HortonWorks and more. Today, the Sema4 team is working with a range of business functions including customer support and finance operations to deploy initial agents into enterprise environments. Tomorrow, Antti described additional functions including HR and software development as part of a near-term vision for deployment.
So what about guardrails? Sema4 is tackling security as well as data integrity flowing into training agents as keys to success. Layer on top of that the organizational compliance and enterprise-class resilience of model adoption, and you can understand that the human trust in bringing AI agents into the enterprise is likely the main time investment in this powerful technology transition. Antti expects to see a wealth of use case deployment examples emerge in the second half of 2024 as the first signal of broad agent adoption.
What’s the TechArena take? We aren’t surprised anymore by the speed of innovation being driven by AI. IT organizations are being pushed to their limits to be agents of change, no pun intended, within the enterprise, and we expect business functions to directly adopt agents with or without internal IT support – much as they did with the initial activation of cloud services to fuel business agility. 2024 and 2025 will be rife with stories of success in this arena, and we can’t wait to hear them. As to worker response to agent deployment…we’ll leave that topic for an upcoming blog as it’s a lot to unpack and urgently needs to be discussed in order to get full value out of these powerful tools.
The pace of innovation in AI is moving at light speed, so it was only a small surprise recently when Antti Karjalainen shared his company’s vision beyond large language models (LLMs).
“So what is an agent? It's a piece of software that, contrasting to traditional software that we've been used to, does not just make you more efficient at your work. Agents will actually complete the work for you. So think about them as sort of a knowledge worker or software that can reason, collaborate and act with humans.”
Antti went on to explain that what we’ve seen with generative AI is just the beginning, and it’s in the application of these models, in his view with agents, that the real transformation of our industries and society will start taking shape.
What Sema4 is delivering is fascinating in terms of its broad reach across industries and the disruptive productivity it places in the hands of human collaborators. In Sema4’s vision, each individual can be unleashed with unlimited AI workers that can research, reason, and deliver task work, freeing the human for more value-added work. At first blush, this vision looks similar to Microsoft co-Pilot. But upon further analysis, it’s more optimized for unique industries or business processes. Antti explained the difference, being that “the AI agent is something that you can actually interact with to get a full work product done.”
“Instead of just assisting on the side, an AI agent is kind of the main thing. An AI agent is going to be a new way to interact with enterprise applications, whereas a co-pilot is more of an additive layer on top,” he said.
When you consider the autonomy in this statement, you can start understanding the power that agents represent to autonomous control of digital functions holistically and start imagining the complexity of delivering this level of control to the enterprise. The team certainly has the technology chops and enterprise awareness to deliver the goods with far-ranging backgrounds from tech leaders including AWS, Cloudera, Docker, HortonWorks and more. Today, the Sema4 team is working with a range of business functions including customer support and finance operations to deploy initial agents into enterprise environments. Tomorrow, Antti described additional functions including HR and software development as part of a near-term vision for deployment.
So what about guardrails? Sema4 is tackling security as well as data integrity flowing into training agents as keys to success. Layer on top of that the organizational compliance and enterprise-class resilience of model adoption, and you can understand that the human trust in bringing AI agents into the enterprise is likely the main time investment in this powerful technology transition. Antti expects to see a wealth of use case deployment examples emerge in the second half of 2024 as the first signal of broad agent adoption.
What’s the TechArena take? We aren’t surprised anymore by the speed of innovation being driven by AI. IT organizations are being pushed to their limits to be agents of change, no pun intended, within the enterprise, and we expect business functions to directly adopt agents with or without internal IT support – much as they did with the initial activation of cloud services to fuel business agility. 2024 and 2025 will be rife with stories of success in this arena, and we can’t wait to hear them. As to worker response to agent deployment…we’ll leave that topic for an upcoming blog as it’s a lot to unpack and urgently needs to be discussed in order to get full value out of these powerful tools.
