Agentic AI in three moves: Connect, co-operate, concierge

Fast Company

6 hours ago

A spring storm wipes out the last Thursday flight from Dallas. One in-app request later, an invisible digital assistant secures a nearby hotel, drops a meal voucher into your wallet, reroutes your suitcase, updates tomorrow's Teams meeting, and (because it senses weariness in your voice) orders an Uber Black. The experience feels less like self-service and more like having a well-briefed assistant orchestrating every detail. The result is not merely a rescued itinerary, but a deeper affinity with the very airline that just disrupted your plans.
That feeling is the promise of agentic AI: software that breaks a goal into tasks, taps outside systems, remembers context across channels, and hands control back to a person whenever judgment matters.
The timing is right. IBM research shows 76% of executives are piloting autonomous agents and 86% expect them to reshape workflows by 2027. Customers are more impatient than ever; 17% quit after one bad interaction, 59% after a few, and 70% expect the next employee or interface to know their context without being told.
Agentic AI can meet that bar, but only if we build in the right order. Think of it as a three-stage path that begins with connecting, moves into the cooperate stage, and ends with the promise land of concierge. Here's how it can work:
1. CONNECT: GIVE EVERY CHANNEL THE SAME MEMORY
First comes plumbing. Funnel every click, order, chat, and loyalty swipe into a lightweight feature store, a living memory capsule any touchpoint can open. This capsule powers an AI copilot beside frontline staff. The copilot drafts answers, suggests next moves, and flags land mines such as a refund that would void a bundle discount before a rep hits send.
Customer Benefit: Instant, consistent replies in one brand voice, regardless of whether the message arrives by SMS, email, or IVR.
Business Benefit: Average handle time drops an estimated 25% and brittle integrations surface early, long before full autonomy.
Design work changes focus. Instead of polishing pixels, teams choreograph conversations: tone curves, escalation triggers, and data contracts replace static mock-ups. Brand language is encoded once, then reused everywhere.
2. CO-OPERATE: LET A SUPERVISED AGENT OWN HIGH-VOLUME TASKS
With the pipes proven, elevate one high-volume journey—where is my order, a password reset, an in-store return—to a supervised agent that still knows when to wave in a human. Because it reads from the same memory capsule, the agent can finish a sizing chat that began on TikTok and push a shipping update straight to Apple Wallet without losing context. If confidence drops, the full thread with rationale lands on an agent's screen.
Customer Benefit: Friction disappears. When a shoe size is gone online, the system checks nearby stores and offers same-day pickup. At the airport, kiosks spot a risky connection and print a later boarding pass before panic sets in.
Business Benefit: Problems are solved on first contact and revenue pops fast; one fashion pilot lifted buy-online-pick-up-in-store conversions by 22% when agents brokered inventory in real time.
Designers double down on micro interactions, surfacing one-tap options and keeping language tight. Strategy teams track completion and sentiment, not cost alone, to keep the experience human.
3. CONCIERGE: ORCHESTRATE SPECIALISTS EVERYWHERE
The final move adds an orchestrator that spawns specialist sub-agents for billing, loyalty, inventory, payments, and more, all sharing state. Open-source stacks such as LangGraph give engineers fine-grained control without vendor lock-in. In ecommerce, the effect is dramatic: A shopping companion can search, compare, and check out inside the brand app, while new payment rails let AI complete a purchase securely on any site.
Customer Benefit: The brand seems to anticipate needs. Wish lists refresh when sizes restock, pantry staples reorder themselves within a spending cap, and a smart mirror recalls everything tried at home. An edit log and a one-tap undo keep the human in charge.
Business Benefit: Service savings persist, but growth becomes the headline. Cart abandonment falls as agents juggle price, stock, and rewards in milliseconds. Every interaction pushes live insight back into product, pricing, and media models. Design, tech, and strategy converge around explainability and seamless human hand-offs; a live expert can join the chat without forcing the shopper to start over.
GUARDRAILS THAT MAKE IT SAFE AND CREDIBLE
Autonomy delights only when it is accountable. Validate with pre-launch testing of generated copy against brand-voice guidelines. Keep a visible skills registry so compliance teams know which agent touches which data. Run security and privacy drills at least quarterly. These checkpoints matter as much to experience quality as typography or color.
THE PAYOFF: LESS FRICTION, MORE GROWTH
Execute connect, co-operate, and concierge in sequence, and customers notice what is missing: repeated forms, channel seams, surprise fees, awkward transfers. A purchase becomes a sentence such as, 'Find me a vegan gift under fifty dollars, deliver Tuesday, use points first,' and service stays invisible until empathy is needed, at which point a person appears fully briefed.
For the organization, efficiency shows up first, growth second. Support costs drop, conversion climbs, and the feature store becomes a feedback loop that sharpens product road maps and media buys. Strategists rank journeys by value and complexity, technologists instrument every agent step, and designers craft feelings of continuity, anticipation, and control.
Brands that master connect, co-operate, concierge will own both the moments that suit automation and the critical times when a human must lead. Those that wait may find their next customer already served instantly by someone else's digital assistant.