Decidr co-CEO David Brudenall featured in Forbes

How To Set Your Agentic AI Strategy

By Megan Poinski, Forbes Staff and CIO, Forbes Staff Writer

Published on April 23, 2026

As agentic AI capabilities expand and more big SaaS providers add agents to their platforms, more companies are adopting them. But are they using them in a way that actually harnesses the technology’s power, or are they bringing in the hot new tech to do things that aren’t really worth the compute?

I spoke with David Brudenell, co-CEO and executive director of agentic AI firm Decidr, about how companies should be thinking about and deploying AI agents. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity.

Where are companies now in terms of AI agent adoption? Are they looking at simple tasks or deploying them to things that could actually make a difference to business?

Brudenell: Of the CIOs and businesses I’ve talked to, boards are saying, ‘You must use AI,’ and their current solution is, ‘Let’s get a corporate account of Claude or OpenAI.’ I spoke to a multi-billion-dollar company based out of New York. On the surface, they claim that their staff have created 1,800 agents. Of the agents that have been created, only 50 are actually used, and of the 50, only four are actually used with any regularity.

Most businesses are experimenting. It’s the probabilistic, such as summarizing documents, creating images. To really start to use AI properly, you need it to be deterministic. Enterprise businesses are deterministic. You need to do the same thing every single time in the same way, and foundation models cannot produce that. Interoperability exposes enterprise businesses more, because that means AI is using probabilistic and transacting at a higher rate. It increases the number of holes in your boat, so to speak.

Businesses are huge workflow engines that go through process steps. And tacit knowledge is the most valuable part of a business, but it’s not well understood. You can’t put an AI in it; you don't really know how work actually gets done. Microsoft said enterprise sovereignty is the most important thing that businesses need to focus on: How you do the thing inside your business. That’s the difference between one law firm deciding to litigate versus another law firm deciding to settle: Same case, but their tacit knowledge is how they figure out which way to go. That’s also pretty critical for understanding where to start with AI.

How should enterprises be figuring out the best way to use AI agents?

AI does not replace jobs. AI replaces tasks in workflows. Businesses are starting to understand that, and that’s the process they’re going through now: Starting to look at, ‘How does my organization look underneath the hood?’ Google codified the click and turned attention into a monetizable thing. AI is going to monetize the task, because we’re literally productizing knowledge.

Enterprises will start to understand what tasks are done in their organization. Then they’re going to say, ‘What is the price for those tasks?’ We’ve been through this journey before. Before AI, it was robotic process automation. Before robotic process automation, it was BPOs [business process outsourcing]. Before BPOs, it was management consultants. Before management consultants, it was the professional manager. We’ve been on the curve of labor cost reduction. AI is another way of reducing labor costs.

As they start to understand where tasks leverage in their organization, there will start to be more pronounced, coordinated activity to replace with AI. That’s why we’re seeing some of the tech titans do mass layoffs in their engineering department because engineering is all language. Writing code is language; literally artifacts of tasks coming out. That’s why it’s one of the first that's being replaced.

Also among the first ones that will be replaced will be in sales and marketing, because those are lowest risk, highest return. When you think about risk, compliance, payroll, no CIO is going to put a startup agent in their payroll process—If the employees aren’t paid, that’s like a nuclear bomb going off in your org. You are not going to replace your accounting system. Versus: Will you change your project management system? Yeah, that’s easy to replace.

What advice would you give to a CIO who is trying to chart the best path for their company to be able to adopt agentic AI in a smart and useful way?

• Before you know where you want to go, you need to know who you are. Start to capture the tacit knowledge in your organization because that is the asset of businesses in the future: how you do things.
• Tacit knowledge capture leads to task understanding. Task understanding begins the quantitative exercise of assessing where the opportunity is, because tasks have cost and you can attach them to your P&L.
• Now you have a quantitative foundation to assess risk, look at ROI and see how your workforce may be reshaped based on the agentic decisions that you make in your business. That’s better to take to a board than, ‘Our sales team now has automated emails, but they’re not actually making more sales.’