Today, every company wants to be an AI company. There is growing confidence among Philippine-based CEOs in AI’s potential for their businesses. A recent report by PwC cites about 88% of PH CEOs see AI as essential to growth and want to embed AI into key business processes.
As we move from chatbots to copilots to autonomous AI agents or “agentic systems,” companies that haven’t already implemented AI risk losing significant ground to competitors. This could happen faster than they think.
Autonomous AI agents go beyond pre-defined scripts to handle nuanced interactions. They can not only generate content but make decisions and take action with limited or no human supervision. The move to intelligent, scalable digital labor represents a true revolution. By 2028, Gartner forecasts that 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously.
This shift has significant implications for Philippine businesses: the potential for a digital labor force to work alongside humans, reducing costs and driving innovation and scalability. For the first time, workforces can be supplemented by autonomous AI agents working around the clock boosting productivity, efficiency, and competitive advantage. Deloitte predicts that 25% of companies globally using generative AI will launch agentic AI pilots this year.
Across every industry, AI agents are making a significant impact. In customer service, they offer 24/7 support, handling a broad range of issues. For inventory management, they automate tasks, optimize stock levels, and provide real-time insights. In recruitment, they streamline the hiring process by screening resumes, scheduling interviews, and conducting initial assessments, reducing the workload on human recruiters.
Beyond business, this technology is improving students’ academic performance by providing personalized tutoring. In healthcare, AI agents reduce administrative burdens, allowing professionals to focus on complex cases and monitor patient progress, leading to better health outcomes.
Maxicare Healthcare Corporation, the Philippines’ leading health maintenance organization (HMO), uses Agentforce to automate dental LOA requests and reduce manual workload. Partner dental clinics can now self-serve by interacting with an AI agent to request LOAs and are automatically notified once the authorization is generated, ultimately resulting in faster delivery of dental care to patients. This frees up Maxicare’s contact center agents to review more complex cases, which Agentforce automatically escalates to a human agent.
The shift to agentic AI systems brings disruptions and risks, not least around trust and data accuracy. Trusting the technology is key to integrating agents. According to Salesforce research, 93% of global desk workers don’t consider AI outputs completely trustworthy for work-related tasks. 60% of consumers say advances in AI make trust even more important.
To build trust, it’s crucial to ensure that AI systems use accurate and relevant data, maintain privacy, and operate within ethical and legal boundaries. This means implementing robust data governance and oversight, and ensuring compliance to local laws and regulations around data privacy, such as the Data Privacy Act of 2012.
AI agents must also be transparent and explainable, so users know when they are interacting with an AI and how it operates. Clear accountability is essential to define responsibility for the agent’s performance and trusted outputs.
The solution to increasing productivity and building trust is not as simple as implementing AI agents immediately, according to a new Salesforce white paper. Achieving AI-driven productivity outcomes across industries requires a phased, context-specific approach that aligns policies, procurement standards, and modernization efforts. This should be supported by the right infrastructure, governance, and skills so that AI agents operate within trusted, secure, and interoperable systems, while ensuring smaller enterprises are not left behind in adoption efforts.
Given the Philippines’ archipelagic geography and the varied needs in urban and rural areas, successful AI integration requires solutions that are inclusive and context-specific. Collaboration across businesses, governments, non-profits, and academia is essential not only to scale these solutions effectively but also to ensure agentic AI actions and decisions align with human values or ethics–reinforcing trust in the process.
Continuous training programs are equally crucial. These help AI stay up-to-date and work effectively alongside humans, enhancing productivity, and allowing employees to focus on more strategic tasks.
By addressing concerns and setting the right conditions for AI adoption, we can envision a future with new levels of productivity and prosperity, driven by human and digital workforce working together.
