Building the Agentic Enterprise, Part 4: Where Agents Create Real Business Value

Where should you deploy agents first? This article maps the landscape of high-value agent use cases across six business functions; finance, HR, supply chain, customer operations, sales, and IT; with real production metrics showing what organizations are achieving today. It then identifies the six characteristics that make certain workflows better candidates for agentic AI than others: high volume, rule-based with defined exceptions, data-intensive and cross-system, handoff-heavy, measurable outcomes, and a well-understood current state. The "What It Takes" section focuses on process maturity; why agents cannot automate what you have not defined, and how to build the process foundation that successful deployments require.