Making AI agents work (the right way) for you

The reasons for these failures are strikingly consistent: a lack of strategy and clear objectives, insufficient technical readiness, purchasing “fake” solutions, or giving in to market-driven psychological pressure. Far less attention is paid to the uncomfortable truth that the technology itself is far from perfect: it’s expensive, complex to implement, and – perhaps most troubling of all – AI agents hallucinate, inventing realities that do not exist. Business process automation (RPA) came first – rule-based algorithms designed to perform repetitive tasks, but without the ability to learn. This was followed by advanced predictive analytics and machine learning (ML), and finally by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), which exhibits a degree of creativity and can generate new content from simple natural-language prompts. This simplified sequence captures the steady increase in autonomy and successive layers of intelligence added to software sy