Enterprise leaders are shifting their focus from generative artificial intelligence to agentic artificial intelligence, treating autonomous agents as the catalyst for the most significant workforce transformation in a generation. In a Cisco and Omdia survey of 650 executives across six countries, by 2027, 80% believe their company’s survival will depend on agentic AI. This urgency is exposing a widening gap between existing infrastructure and what is required to run agentic artificial intelligence securely and at scale, with leaders concluding that more robust, modern networks are needed quickly.
Executives on average predict that 55% of their workforce will be collaborating with AI agents in the next 24 months, yet legacy systems and a deepening skills shortage threaten to delay progress. Organizations already running artificial intelligence agents in production view agentic artificial intelligence as a trigger for a fundamental reset of both infrastructure and people strategies, not just a technical upgrade. As autonomous agents begin making decisions and taking action across applications, clouds and data, the underlying data, network and security controls become decisive in determining whether deployments scale or stall. Reflecting this reality, 87% of leaders have already reshaped their organization’s strategic priorities to support agentic AI, but many acknowledge that without resilient, secure and agile infrastructure, the potential of agentic artificial intelligence will remain out of reach.
The workforce implications are equally significant, with 65% of organizations expecting agentic AI to create entirely new job categories over the next three to five years. The emergence of roles such as the Chief AI Officer illustrates how companies are blending technical depth with cross functional leadership to move from pilots to enterprise wide adoption. Nearly 60% of employees will need to upskill, extending beyond prompt engineering to supervising, auditing and trusting autonomous agents, turning the shift into a cultural as well as technological transformation. Early adopters are already reallocating spend, with agentic AI now accounting for 37% of technology budgets. Among organizations that have invested strategically in agentic AI infrastructure and workforce readiness, 43% report meaningful ROI and 39% anticipate returns within a year, reinforcing the view that the agentic artificial intelligence era has arrived and that near term investments in infrastructure and talent will shape long term competitive outcomes.
