The agentic AI revolution is about a lot more than just creating intelligent pieces of software to perform routine tasks. In fact, it is an early look at what promises to be a complete transformation for enterprise digital labor.

The rapid rise to prominence of a relatively new vendor in the enterprise software marketplace provides an instructive look at what this transformation will entail. Sema4.ai Inc., a startup launched in 2024, has a bold goal to develop agents that go beyond mere analysis. In Sema4,ai’s world, AI agents can reason, take action and become deeply integrated into enterprise workflows. This will reshape job roles as agents increasingly become valuable partners with human co-workers.

“The greatest return on investment from AI won’t come solely from optimizing IT, but from augmenting human efforts with intelligent digital labor,” said Scott Hebner, principal analyst for AI at theCUBE Research. “For AI agents to generate enterprise-wide ROI, they must operate across traditional boundaries and connect seamlessly with both human colleagues and organizational systems. TheCUBE Research fully agrees with Sema4.ai’s philosophical view that it’s about cultural human resource transformation, not just technology-driven productivity. Sema4.ai is not just building software; it’s laying the foundation for a new labor model where digital agents work alongside humans as trusted co-workers.”

Hebner provided his analysis in a recent report on Sema4.ai as part of the AI Agent Builder Summit, an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. During the event, executives from Sema4.ai offered a vision for how a deeply engineered and user-centric strategy for deployment of AI agents can have an impact in real-world business environments. (* Disclosure below.)

No-code platform propels digital labor

To develop the digital labor marketplace, Sema4.ai has taken an approach that leverages no-code AI agents and a comprehensive set of frameworks for trust and governance. The company’s no-code capability centers around Sema4 Agent Intelligence, or Sai. It is an embedded natural language AI assistant that empowers both tech-savvy users and non-developers to build enterprise-grade agents without needing sophisticated coding skills.

“Its objective in life is to democratize agent creation across the enterprise, within a governed framework,” Hebner said. “By allowing business analysts and domain experts to describe agent behavior in natural language, Sai shifts the responsibility of innovation from developers to those who best understand the business process and desired outcomes.”

Once the agents are created, users need to have confidence that these digital assistants will earn the trust of decision-makers and IT. Agents with robust safeguards and explainable results are far more likely to inspire confidence in making low-risk decisions without human oversight, according to Hebner.

“No trust, no AI,” said Hebner, in a video discussion during the event. “You’ve got to understand that people are only going to use these agents and partner with them to do things if they trust them. So, they’ve got to be safe, they’ve got to be accurate, they’ve got to be fast and responsive and they have to be explainable. Trust is becoming the currency of innovation.”

Building a framework of trust

To meet this expectation of trust, Sema4.ai has made its SAFE framework a central part of their enterprise AI agent offering. SAFE, which stands for “secure, accurate, fast, extensible,” encompasses security, compliance and data privacy along with an ability to let businesses understand why their agents are doing what is expected.

“By embedding trust into security, accuracy, responsiveness and explainability, Sema4.ai aims to differentiate itself around the ‘trust dimension,’” Hebner said. “Unlike traditional automation, Sema4.ai‘s agents are not just fast or intelligent — they are built to be governable and auditable from the start.”

The trust dimension also means that users will have confidence in the ecosystem that Sema4.ai has built around its agentic offering. Koch Industries Inc. is using Sema4.ai’s agents to manage its invoice reconciliation process, and Emerson Electric Co. has deployed agents to streamline its payments remittance workflow.

Sema4.ai has also strengthened its integration with Snowflake Inc. Customers can deploy agents directly within Snowflake’s platform using Container Services and Cortex AI.

“Additionally, the recent launch of the Enterprise Edition reinforces their SAFE promise by enhancing document intelligence, knowledge-base retrieval and contextual understanding through Snowflake’s Model Context Protocol, MCP, which enables agents to connect to any enterprise application contextually,” Hebner noted.

Sema4.ai is led by Rob Bearden, who previously served as CEO for data analytics provider Cloudera Inc. In June, the company announced the raising of $25 million from Benchmark and Mayfield Fund, along with investments from Snowflake Ventures and Rocketship VC, among others.

It emerged from stealth last year, not longer after its founding, piloted its platform with Fortune 1000 companies and acquired the intelligent open-source automation firm Robocorp. The company appears to be well positioned to complete the puzzle of how to make AI agents an essential ingredient in digital labor.

“We believe Sema4.ai has cracked this code,” Hebner said. “By uniting no-code creation, AI-assisted agent building and robust governance in a single architecture, they transform agentic AI from a technology experiment into a business transformation platform. It’s not just empowering business users, it positions them at the center of AI’s next frontier.”

(* Disclosure: Sema4.ai is a sponsor of the AI Agent Builder Summit, an event produced by theCUBE. Sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE