How we work: The gen AI agents are coming

New advances in gen AI are radically recalibrating the costs and benefits of modernizing legacy tech and reducing tech debt. This development is meaningful because as much as 70 percent of the software used by Fortune 500 companies was developed 20 or more years ago.²  Much of the value hinges on how well companies can build and manage a workforce of gen AI agents. These are still early days, but harnessing gen AI agents can eliminate much of the manual work, leading to a 40 to 50 percent acceleration in tech modernization timelines and a 40 percent reduction in costs.³

 
To capture this value, tech officers in 2025 will have to think more broadly across a number of vectors. The first vector is around the scale of gen AI agents themselves. It is possible to enable hundreds of gen AI agents to operate independently with human oversight. Specialized AI agents, each with distinct roles and expertise, collaborate on complex tasks, including data analysis, orchestrating sophisticated integrations, designing and running test cases, and refining outcomes based on real-time feedback from humans.

The next vector of expansion is around the scale of the work the agents do. The real value of gen AI agents comes from orchestrating them to complete not just tasks but entire software development processes. Tech leaders will need to think through the range of controls necessary to manage this army of gen AI agents, such as feedback loops that allow them to review and refine each other’s work, programming them to ask questions directly of managers, and ensuring sufficient human oversight.

 
The last vector is around value. Gen AI agents have the potential to radically redefine the cost-benefit ratio of modernizing systems and reducing tech debt. Tech leaders will need to identify the largest and most complex technology problems—the ones that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, have multiyear timelines, and are responsible for large tranches of technical debt—and focus on developing gen AI solutions for them.