Interest in Agentic AI is very strong. John Roese, Dell’s Global CTO and Chief AI Officer has gone so far to declare “Agentic” the word of the year. What’s behind all of this, and how best can you take advantage of Agentic AI? The potential for Agentic AI is easy to grasp. Who wouldn’t want an AI-powered assistant that can handle repetitive, low-value tasks autonomously? Business leaders are already pondering how to make their key functions more responsive and streamlined, reserving people power for more complex and high-value operations.
What Is Agentic AI and Why Does It Matter?
First, let’s define the term. Agentic AI technology is an evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) that power Generative AI systems. Instead of posing a series of queries (or ‘prompts’ in AI parlance) to an LLM, with Agentic AI you provide general guidance and the Agentic AI system decomposes the problem into a series of tasks, evaluating the results of each task to further guide the process and the eventual result. The key is that Agentic AI systems provide more autonomy than earlier AI approaches.
Identifying Tasks Perfect for Agentic AI
What kinds of tasks lend themselves to Agentic AI? Over time, the possibilities are quite broad, but it’s still early days for this technology, so you probably want to focus on tasks where you won’t have to worry too much about agents going off-track. Think about menial, low-value tasks that most practitioners consider drudgery, particularly those high-value functions and practitioners face. For example, you may want to explore agentic solutions for sales teams to use for administrative tasks such as expense reporting or summarizing web information about their customers.
Streamlining Workflows with Value Stream Mapping
So, the first step is to think carefully about your high-value business functions and what tasks are valuable and which are drudgery. Dell Services experts can assist with an approach to workflow engineering called value stream mapping. With value stream mapping, Dell professionals work with you to identify where and how GenAI can streamline, accelerate and improve operations by informing, performing or automating some of the functions in the transformed workflow. This helps you pinpoint which parts of the workflow can benefit the most from Agentic AI.
Getting Started with Agentic AI: The Role of RAG
Now that you have a good grip on where you want to focus Agentic AI, how best to get started with the technology? Many organizations have already started with AI using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). With RAG, you can integrate specific enterprise data for a particular use case so that queries to an AI large language model will provide better context-specific responses. Now Agentic RAG solutions are available, which are a great way to get started with Agentic AI.
Agentic RAG: Enhancing Decision-Making and Insights
How does Agentic RAG work? Agentic RAG improves the retrieval and value of RAG responses with workflows that autonomously refine the RAG responses with enhanced insights from additional data. One agent focuses on retrieving more general information from the web for broader context, while another agent focuses on retrieving the enterprise data that you added to the RAG solution to deliver more accurate responses. These automated workflows can improve decision-making while also providing clearer, multi-model outputs including graphs, images and tables.
Last year, Dell Technologies introduced RAG solutions and professional services to make it easier for IT organizations to experiment with RAG, as part of the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA. Building on this foundation, customers can now extend their RAG solutions with Agentic RAG on the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA. And of course, we’re also expanding our Acceleration Services for RAG to support Agentic RAG and deploy the solution quickly and gain experience with Agentic AI. So just as RAG is a great way to drive insights from your data, Agentic RAG is a great way to refine those insights and gain experience with Agentic AI.experiment with Agentic AI.
Dell Technologies: Your Partner in Agentic AI Innovation
Want to learn more? Come visit the Dell Technologies booth at NVIDIA GTC, where we’ll be demonstrating the solution and where you can meet with AI experts from our professional services team. Check out our Professional Services for AI, which can accelerate your AI outcomes at every stage. Ask your Dell representative for more details.
