The past year has provided ample evidence for the transformative nature of AI agents to intelligently automate workflows and empower users to focus on more business-critical activities. Sema4.ai Inc. is seeking to take agents to the next level through the deployment of highly accurate solutions without the need for additional coding.

The company’s approach to agents, intelligent pieces of software that can perform specific tasks, is driven by a belief that enterprises want to build agents once and deploy them anywhere. This allows users to enable agentic AI in a wide range of environments, including major platforms such as Snowflake Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc.

“Secure, accurate, fast and explainable, that’s the cornerstone of how we think about enterprise AI agents,” said Ram Venkatesh (pictured, middle), co-founder and chief technology officer of Sema4.ai.

Venkatesh spoke with theCUBE’s Scott Hebner (left) at the AI Agent Builder Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Tommi Holmgren (right), vice president of product at Sema4.ai, and they discussed how AI agents are emerging as central tools for enterprise business processes. (* Disclosure below.)

Secure access for AI agents

Security plays an important role in Sema4.ai’s strategy for building and deploying AI agents. During theCUBE’s interview, Holmgren provided a demonstration of the platform’s agent building capabilities using secure access for necessary systems and credentials.

“I securely manage the API keys for the agent,” Holmgren explained. “I need to be able to manage the service accounts that an agent needs. The business user can log into their, for example, Google account or Microsoft account, and let the agent use those credentials in accessing various systems securely.”

Sema4.ai has developed a process for AI agent building that is analogous to putting together pieces of the human body. What makes an agent tick?

“We like to refer to these agents as having a left brain, right brain, hands, and feet,” Venkatesh said. “The right brain for our agent is essentially the business logic. The left brain is … all of the data sources that the agent has access to, your transactional data, historical data, and then APIs to connect to various applications, both SaaS and on-premises. Finally, the hands and feet are really about the agents being able to take actions and achieve outcomes.”

Research analysts at theCUBE have predicted that the agentic AI movement will be game changing, with some surveys showing a five-fold increase in agent deployments year-over-year. Venkatesh advises taking a smaller, measured approach for first-time users to gain more confidence in how the technology can achieve positive results.

“Start small, but think big,” he said. “There’s a lot of hype and people think that, oh, everything’s agentic and there’s an agent for every part of my business. Build up the confidence in understanding how an agent is actually going to work, and the best place to do that is to pick up a problem that’s material but not the most important problem in your company.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AI Agent Builder Summit:

(* Disclosure: Sema4.ai Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Sema4.ai nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE Media