Artificial intelligence in the enterprise is moving beyond assistive tools into something more ambitious: the rise of the agentic enterprise, built on intelligent agents designed to drive outcomes at the very core of business. Companies are looking not just to automate tasks at the edges, but to embed AI into the heart of their processes, where revenue, efficiency and customer experience converge.

Bhaskar Roy (pictured), chief of AI products and solutions at Workato Inc., outlined how his team is framing this shift. He pointed to the company’s Genie agents and the broader platform expansion as a way to rethink how work gets done inside organizations, moving from experimentation to enterprise-scale deployment.

Workato’s Bhaskar Roy talks with theCUBE about the company’s new Genies and the Workato ONE platform.

“Genies are agents, but the way Genies are different is [that] if you look at typical agents, people are mainly doing it at the fringes of their organization,” he told theCUBE. “Summarize, email, create content … they’re not able to go down to the core of your business process and optimize that. The core of a business process is … it all drives our [key performance indicators], business KPIs. Genies start with the KPIs in mind … so it does actual work in order to really drive to what are your business KPIs.”

Roy spoke with theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson and Rob Strechay at the WOW: World of Workato event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the new fleet of production-grade Genies, the Workato ONE platform and the broader vision of an agentic enterprise. (* Disclosure below.)

How Workato ONE orchestration powers the agentic enterprise

The centerpiece of Workato’s product announcements was the integration of Genies with the long-standing orchestration capabilities of the Workato platform. By combining workflow automation with agentic intelligence, the company aims to make AI agents not just useful, but essential to enterprise operations, according to Roy.

“Let’s start with Workato ONE,” he said. “One of the core things that makes our Genie really great is [that] it can orchestrate workflows. Because if it’s not able to do that, why is it there? It’s just summarizing things and building on content, which we all know we can do with ChatGPT. So, orchestration becomes a very key part of it. Workato ONE brings together orchestration capabilities [and] marries it with our agentic capabilities. Think of them as pre-packaged agents … within a couple of weeks, you are off to the races.”

Workato’s customers are already adopting Genies quickly, with some organizations now rolling out new agents on a four- to six-week cadence, accelerating momentum toward an agentic enterprise, according to Roy. That speed underscores how prebuilt, customizable Genies are intended to accelerate adoption and help enterprises shift from pilot projects to a truly agentic enterprise.

“We see that in our customers — they start with one and in a few months, you know, they go to four or five,” Roy said. “There are customers who now have a cadence of four to six weeks. They roll out a Genie within four to six weeks, and they’re just going what we call wall to wall with all the various orchestration.”

From fringe tools to core coworkers

Beyond specific product launches, Roy framed the future of enterprise AI in terms of what he called “core agents.” Moving past the so-called “agency gap,” Workato is working with customers to embed AI into complex workflows and processes that deliver measurable outcomes.

“There was one thing that we noticed … analysts called it the agency gap, where most of the agents being deployed were at the fringes,” Roy said. “They were low agency, doing simple stuff. But then on the high agency — complex workflows, complex systems — people were not going there with the agents. So, that became a North Star … until we go to the core. That became the premise of what we call core agents or Genies.”

These agents are not designed to replace workers, but to serve as coworkers, handling repetitive tasks so humans can focus on higher-value decision-making. The result is a culture of augmentation at the heart of the agentic enterprise, according to Roy.

“This is not about job replacement or anything like that,” he said. “We think of them as just like … coworkers: They’re there to help augment what you do every day. If all the standard admin analysis work you have to do on a day-to-day basis … if I have someone who can help me go through that so I can evaluate, supervise and guide just like a manager, I can coach and say, ‘OK, this is great, but you need to start looking into this as well.’ Those become the things that we all enjoy doing rather than all the various grunt work.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the WOW: World of Workato event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the WOW: World of Workato event. Neither Workato Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE