The Blindspot in Agentic AI - It Isn’t Technical

The Blind Spot In Agentic AI

There is a major blind spot in the promising future of Agentic AI, and it isn’t a problem with the rapidly evolving technology.  It’s much more mundane than that. It’s an age-old problem that has existed for decades, lying at the heart of the way that enterprises develop and deliver automation.

But before we can understand this problem, we have to look at the current accepted theory about Agentic AI - to see the common blind spot that is lurking in all these expectations. 

Streamlining Operations. By automating routine tasks, AI Agents can help optimize workflows, making everything run more smoothly. This means less time spent on repetitive work and more focus on strategic planning and execution. With data-driven insights, businesses can make faster and more accurate decisions, ultimately leading to improved efficiency and scalability without needing to hire extra staff.

Enhancing Employee Engagement. AI Agents also promise to boost employee satisfaction. By taking care of mundane tasks, they free up employees to engage in more meaningful and creative work. This shift not only makes jobs more enjoyable but also allows employees to learn new skills more quickly, fostering a culture of continuous growth. Plus, with more flexibility in their roles, employees can achieve a better work-life balance, making for a happier workplace.

Delivering Superior Customer Experiences. Perhaps the most talked-about benefit of AI Agents is their ability to enhance customer experience. By analyzing customer data, these agents can provide personalized interactions that make customers feel valued. They also handle complex customer situations quickly and accurately, ensuring that issues are resolved promptly. This level of service not only satisfies customers but also builds loyalty over time.

So what’s the blind spot in all this? 

In a word, it’s documentation - that age-old problem that has held back so many of the promises of enterprise automation, long before AI came on the scene. As we all know, the fuel of AI is accurate knowledge, and that knowledge has to come from somewhere. 

LLMs and other AI tools have done a spectacular job of ingesting and applying the mind-bogglingly huge amount of knowledge available from the Internet and other sources - and enhancing it through powerful techniques - such as refinement and RAG. 

But when it comes to Agentic AI, there is a specific kind of knowledge that it needs in order to operate autonomously - performing complex, multi-step tasks. This is end-to-end knowledge about how the enterprise actually operates - detailed interactions and data flows across platforms, organizations, customers, and suppliers. Where is this knowledge supposed to come from? 

In theory, it should all be there - in the form of documentation.  But in reality, documentation is the poorest cousin of them all - it’s the lowest priority task when it comes to the crushing backlog of features being demanded by the business.

Now when we think about the missing documentation that’s hurting Agentic AI the most, it isn’t code documentation - which is what many people and solutions are focusing on. It’s the cross-organizational, end-to-end documentation that’s deeply fragmented across teams and often lives only in the heads of a few specialized people who can be impossible to find. Things like business processes, system interactions, data flows, and others.

We call this the multi-domain documentation gap.

In fact, not only is the multi-domain documentation gap hurting the future of Agentic AI, it’s been shown that people spend up to 20% of their time chasing the knowledge they need to do their day-to-day jobs. There’s a lot more to say about that and other well-quantified impacts of the multi-domain documentation gap in future posts.

DomainStream Technologies has the required multi-domain experts who can address this gap.

We help organizations build, maintain and automatically pipe their enterprise knowledge to AI Agents - so they can operate accurately and effectively, as promised. We apply our proprietary Knowledge Management Method™ combined with the latest tools and techniques to get the job done right. 

Contact us to find out more.