Agentic AI – Moving GenAI from Advisor to Key Actor
- Details
- Written by Jason Hardy
Having an AI advisor that provides recommendations based on your direction can be helpful. But an expert actor that can make decisions and work without oversight is even more powerful.
That’s exactly where the AI plot is going with agentic AI.
Introducing Agentic AI, Your New Workplace Hero
Perhaps you’re not familiar with agentic AI, or you’ve heard of it but aren’t sure what it means.
Agentic AI employs generative AI and operates in both a recommendation and a fully autonomous mode. Starting with the recommendation mode before going fully autonomous is the recommended practice. But what’s really exciting is agentic AI’s potential to go beyond relying on your prompts and offering guidance on what you might do – and acting and adjusting as needed to changing circumstances.
Whether your company requires assistance with customer service, more help in its human resources (HR) organization, or added muscle for IT functions, agentic AI has the potential to get the job done. In IT, agentic AI could optimize and manage data with the ultimate in efficiency.
Here are a few ways that agentic AI can come into play to improve IT operations.
ACT I: Tap Agentic AI’s Talent for Faster Data Tagging and Management
IT has come a long way, and as technology advances, it creates new opportunities for organizations to improve. But with data growth expected to more than double in the next two years and an ever-growing increase in cyberthreats, enterprises are also dealing with significant complexity.
Agentic AI holds the potential to simplify the complex by automating and expediting onerous IT efforts. For example, agentic AI could categorize, tag, and organize enterprise data, wherever it lives.
With these capabilities, your organization could retrieve data and identify patterns in data to get insights – all in real time. Imagine you want to identify and encrypt sensitive data to lower your business risk. Agentic AI could do that in no time flat, making your business more resilient in the process.
ACT II: Unwrap the Optimization Benefits that Agentic AI Has in Store
With so much different data throughout hybrid enterprises, efficient storage may seem unattainable. But through agentic AI and its emerging capabilities, it can help organizations achieve the ultimate in storage efficiency and data accessibility.
Agentic AI can continually examine storage use across your enterprise, balance workloads, and reallocate storage resources when and where it makes sense – and it can do it without delay.
This allows you to stop over-provisioning and start optimizing storage resources. With little to no manual effort, agentic AI can align the data used to support business processes in highly accessible hot storage and slot your rarely used data in more cost-effective storage. As these access patterns evolve, agentic AI can help ensure the technology hosting this data evolves with it.
ACT III: Leverage Agentic AI’s Predictive Powers to Get Ahead of IT Issues
By now it’s understood that every minute your digital business is out of commission can cost you thousands or even millions of dollars or more.
Agentic AI can enable your business to avoid IT-related downtime by:
- • Anticipating and avoiding failures by monitoring key pieces of telemetry
- • Automating maintenance processes and scheduling
- • Initiating ordering and shipping or replacement equipment
No longer are you just getting prompts for an impending issue or even an issue that has already occurred. Now your business processes can become self-healing, and issues are resolved before you are even aware those problems existed.
As a result, your business can become more resilient.
ACT IV: Add Agentic AI’s Muscle to Strengthen Your Defenses Against Cyberthreats
The same is true when it comes to cybersecurity – time is of the essence, and acting fast to detect and respond to threats, and recover rapidly from attacks, is critical.
But humans can only move so fast amid growing IT complexity and ever-evolving attacks.
However, agentic AI excels at identifying and isolating specific data or systems from cybersecurity threats such as ransomware. It can also initiate immutable snapshots, air gaps, or backups to reduce response times, mitigating or preventing damage before it occurs.
Agentic AI: Coming to a Business Near You
The stage is set for agentic AI’s big debut.
We can’t predict exactly how this story will play out. But it’s going to be transformative, and Hitachi Vantara will have a key role to play in it.
Agentic AI has the potential to know what to do every time – no teleprompter or heavy direction required. That will empower businesses to tag and better understand their data, optimize their data storage, meet compliance requirements with ease, increase IT resilience, and amp up cybersecurity.
A Call to Action for Canadian CIOs
For Canadian CIOs, the shift to agentic AI is both a competitive opportunity and a leadership test. Canada’s digital economy is scaling rapidly, but talent shortages, rising cyberattacks, and mounting regulatory pressures (including evolving data residency and privacy requirements) put CIOs at the center of critical decisions. The immediate steps are clear: start by piloting agentic AI in areas where automation can deliver quick wins, such as data classification or workload balancing. At the same time, build governance frameworks that ensure AI aligns with Canadian privacy standards and sector-specific regulations. Finally, engage your executive peers early to frame agentic AI not just as an IT upgrade but as a national competitiveness play. CIOs who move now will not only streamline operations but also position their organizations – and Canada’s digital economy – for resilience and growth in the AI-first era.
Jason Hardy is Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Client Strategy and Artificial Intelligence at Hitachi Vantara, where he shapes the company’s AI strategy and portfolio. With over 20 years of experience in digital transformation, data intelligence, object storage, and high-performance analytics, he brings a strong customer-centric approach informed by consulting with hundreds of global clients. Jason is recognized for fostering trusted partnerships, representing Hitachi Vantara at industry events, and sharing insights on how emerging technologies drive business outcomes.
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