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Forbes
17-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
3 Reasons Your Business Doesn't Need AI Agents
Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash If you saw the HBO show Game of Thrones, you're probably aware of the close but complex relationship Daenerys Targaryen had with her three dragons, Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion. In the show, dragons are powerful but dangerous creatures—in Daenerys's case, two of them proved to be too uncontrollable for even her—the mother of dragons herself—to fully manage. AI may not be able to incinerate an enemy army with a blast of flames, but even so, its awesome power reminds me quite a bit of those dragons. There's so much that today's technology can do, but its abilities should not be taken lightly. The AI landscape is still pitted with ethical and legal challenges, privacy concerns, unchecked biases and hallucinations. For leaders considering implementing agentic AI into their operations, these risks are essential to consider. The truth is, not every company needs an AI agent. Thinking of building your own? Here are three reasons why you shouldn't. Your Customers Don't Really Need It Businesses of all stripes have gone all in on AI, and the result has been a multitude of AI-driven products that no one needs—or wants. But jumping on the agentic AI bandwagon just to keep up with the tech-enabled Joneses can not only backfire, it can be a liability. In fact, research published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management found that, rather than signalling advanced capabilities and features, products that advertise the use of AI can actually repel customers. 'When AI is mentioned, it tends to lower emotional trust, which in turn decreases purchase intentions,' said Mesut Cicek, the study's lead author. 'We found emotional trust plays a critical role in how consumers perceive AI-powered products.' This isn't to say that AI isn't transformative for businesses—according to Gartner, 79 percent of corporate strategists agree that AI is critical to success. The key is to ensure you're actually implementing agents in a way that will serve your customers, and not simply capitalizing on the latest buzz. Conduct market research, figure out your friction points, and listen to feedback. The last thing you want is to dump time, energy and money into an offering that never needed to exist. You're Hoping To Replace Your Human Workforce What sets AI agents apart from LLMs is their ability to operate autonomously: For example, while an LLM can generate text responses or summaries when prompted, an AI agent can proactively schedule tasks, connect to external systems (like email or databases), and execute actions on its own—without waiting for a human request. For organizations looking to unlock efficiency and save their human workforces from dull, repetitive tasks, agents represent an exciting opportunity. But if your goal is to eliminate every flesh-and-blood member of your team in exchange for a hyper-efficient, AI-powered workforce, you're looking at it wrong. While the autonomy of agentic AI is one of its features, it's also one of its greatest risks. Their ability to act independently poses any number of threats, from accidental privacy exposure or data poisoning, which can lead to devastating consequences. As Shomit Ghose writes at UC Berkeley's Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology: 'We might grant some lenity to an LLM-driven chatbot that hallucinates an incorrect answer, leading us to lose a bar bet. We'll be less charitable when an LLM-driven agentic AI hallucinates a day-trading strategy in our stock portfolios.' As a leader, your goal should be for AI agents to work alongside your team, not to replace it. The fact is, agents are good, but they're not infallible. If an agent commits an error that doesn't get caught until it's too late, your organization will lose credibility that it may never recover. You're Not Paying Attention To Government Regulations And Risk Management The rapid advance of AI agents have created unprecedented opportunities for businesses, but without proper governance, these systems can quickly become liabilities. A major challenge is that AI operates autonomously across vast datasets, learning and evolving in ways that may not always align with ethical or regulatory standards. Leaders considering implementing agentic AI should familiarize themselves with all of the potential hazards, and establish structured oversight frameworks to mitigate them. As AI-powered decision-making becomes more integral to business operations, companies must establish clear policies around compliance, transparency, and accountability. This includes adopting governance models that align with all current regulations, which are changing rapidly. Organizations should also integrate AI risk management frameworks to ensure ongoing monitoring and ethical deployment. AI agents, like Daenerys's dragons, hold immense power. But without careful and deliberate strategy, they can quickly become more of a liability than an asset. Instead of rushing to adopt AI for the sake of staying on trend, businesses must take a measured approach, ensuring their agents serve real needs, support human expertise, and adhere to evolving regulations.
Forbes
01-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Everyone Wants AI, Except Your Customers
Marketing products as "AI-powered" can hurt, not boost, sales. Business leaders are crazy for AI. Many firms are claiming to be 'AI-first' enterprises. In the latest McKinsey Global Survey on AI, 78% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function, up from 72% in early 2024 and 55% a year earlier. The AI bug has infected marketers, too. Every product launch seems to feature "AI-powered" this and "artificial intelligence" that. But here's the problem: many of your customers hate it. New research reveals a surprising truth. When Washington State University and Temple University researchers split test participants into two groups, one seeing "AI-powered" products and the other seeing "new technology" products. There was no halo effect for AI. The AI group was consistently less likely to buy. In that study, published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, researchers presented 1,000 respondents with product descriptions. They found that products described as using AI were consistently less popular. The Psychology Behind the AI Backlash The reason isn't rational. It's emotional. "The main findings of this study is the use of AI decreases emotional trust," says Mesut Cicek, assistant professor at Washington State University, according to CX Dive. "The consumers have trust issues with AI, and then also it decreases the purchase intention." Think about what happens in your customer's brain when they see "AI-powered." You hope they're thinking about efficiency or innovation. More likely, they're thinking about job losses, hallucinations, pizza glue, privacy breaches, and machines making decisions they don't understand. Maybe even the terminator robots of a dystopian future. "When we were thinking about this project, we thought that AI will improve [consumers' willingness to buy] because everyone is promoting AI in their products," says Dogan Gursoy, a regents professor at Washington State and study co-author, according to the Wall Street Journal. "But apparently it has a negative effect, not a positive one." The effect gets worse with risk. The difference was smaller for items researchers called low risk, like a television, but more pronounced for offerings perceived to be riskier buys, such as a car or a medical-diagnostic service. Older Customers Are More AI-Averse A separate study described in the WSJ article, conducted by Parks Associates, confirms this trend. Of roughly 4,000 Americans surveyed, 18% said AI would make them more likely to buy, 24% said less likely, and 58% said it made no difference. Among younger respondents (age 18 to 44), 24% to 27% said they would likely buy a product advertised as including AI. But among respondents age 65 and older, 32% said they would be less likely to buy a product advertised with AI. The most affluent customer segment, older adults with disposable income, is the group most often rejecting AI marketing. What Marketers Should Do About AI Claims Famed Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt offered this insightful quote: 'People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!' In other words, don't boast about your tungsten carbide, diamond-enhanced, ultra-durable drill bits. Your customers just want faster holes, cleaner holes, and more holes. So, don't abandon AI enhancements to your products. Just stop bragging about it, at least until consumer attitudes change. Focus on benefits, not buzzwords. Ask people if they want to talk to an AI chatbot, and they'll say no. (To be fair, until recently most chatbots have been useless friction to keep customers from bothering actual humans.) But, ask if they want instant, reliable problem resolution and they'll be all-in. I expect attitudes to change over time, probably sooner rather than later. Some markets are already eager to embrace AI. With business leaders clamoring for more rapid AI adoption, B2B sales pitches will usually benefit from AI messaging. Marketers always do better when they focus on customer needs than product details. Until your customers feel they really must have AI in their products, don't go out of your way to talk about it—even if AI is making the product better.
