Enterprises will take 18-24 months to see real benefits of Agentic AI: IBM executive

While there are a lot of claims about agentic artificial intelligence (AI) currently, the real benefits will come in the next 18-24 months as enterprises implement these solutions in their systems, Dinesh Nirmal, senior vice president, IBM Software, told ET.

Agentic AI is becoming a key area of interest for large enterprises and startups, with the latest McKinsey report estimating the market’s potential to be $11 trillion to $18 trillion globally in the areas of marketing, sales, and supply chain. While there is potential, the report noted that over 80% of the companies have not seen any material impact on their top or bottomline from their GenAI initiatives.

Nirmal said that while any new technology will take time for adoption, considering that there are multiple challenges in terms of reliability, scalability, security, and regulatory concerns. “But the potential is huge,” he said.


The company is seeing demand for agentic AI solutions from its clients. It is also using these solutions internally. IBM is seeing momentum from Indian enterprise customers, said Nirmal.

To tap into the growing demand, the company has launched the Agentic AI Innovation Centre at its Bengaluru office, where it will work with customers, partners, and startups to co-create solutions, build AI agents, fine-tune small language models, and audit the process on IBM watsonx Orchestrate. But the company did not disclose the scale of the initiative.

Nirmal said that the centre will be a part of its global effort and will focus on building AgentOps, agent-to-agent communication, and security aspects to stay ahead in the agentic AI space.

He said that India is critical for the company, given the scale of talent and skills in the country.