Enterprise leaders have spent the past few years testing what generative AI can do. Balkrishan “BK” Kalra believes that experimental phase is ending. Time of experiments is gone,” the Genpact president and CEO said during Newsweek’s Sept. 17 “AI Impact Forum” webinar, “The Inflection Point: How Agentic Operations Compound Enterprise Value,” hosted by Dr.
Data has to be usable, processes need to hold up across business units, employees need enough fluency to work with the tools and someone must remain accountable when an agent acts. Kalra said scale use cases should ultimately be judged against business performance. He framed the test in three terms: whether companies can “grow faster, operate leaner or convert more to cash.” Those gains become harder to reach when AI leaves a contained test and enters the systems, data and rules that govern everyday operations.
Tinaikar cited research from Genpact and HFS Research, based on a survey of 2,002 enterprise executives across 16 industries and 14 functions, that found that only 6 percent of organizations qualified as proven debt re-mediators under the study’s framework—meaning they had established initiatives to address those problems, executed them and measured the results. He asked Kalra what senior management teams should address before pushing further into agentic operations. Kalra described technology debt as the accumulation of old systems, infrastructure and layers of patched-together technology.
Beneath it, he argued, are data debt, process debt and talent debt, each of which can constrain what companies are able to do with AI. Agents make those deficiencies harder to overlook because they depend on usable data and company-specific context to act. Business processes introduce another layer of complexity: What looks like a single process from the top may contain different rules, exceptions and practices across countries, states or business units.
Kalra’s point is that a general-purpose model cannot reliably navigate those variations without the specific data and process knowledge of the enterprise. Kalra used global operations to illustrate how requirements can vary by jurisdiction. Much of the knowledge needed to navigate those differences sits inside the enterprise, sometimes undocumented, in the way employees handle exceptions and move transactions from one function to another.
IT and governance need to enter those conversations early. An audience member asked how companies could build confidence among IT departments when deploying agentic systems. Kalra’s answer began with who should be involved from the start.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
