How AI agents can eliminate waste in your business - and why that's smarter than cutting costs

Hazal Ak / iStock via Getty Images Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways AI agents help identify and remove waste in business. All waste is costly, but not all costs are wasteful. CEOs pursue cost efficiency with AI to protect performance. In an AI-powered economy, business leaders are focused on enhancing the productivity and efficiency of their workforce and operations. To accelerate value creation, while focusing on cost reductions and efficiencies, companies are identifying and removing silos -- structural, data, and organizational -- so they can successfully deploy hyper automation and emerging technologies like autonomous AI agents and robots, serving as an extension of their digital labor. Also: Gartner says add AI agents ASAP - or else. Oh, and they're also overhyped There is a warning regarding the removal of silos that is worth mentioning. When you remove silos without an alternative way to manage your resources, you risk creating a spill instead of a flow. A spill is a waste of resources that can even become a pollutant or a hazard. A boundless organization, by contrast, creates and then directs flows of resources to wherever it most needs them. Focusing on cost optimization In response to softening demand or deteriorating market conditions, businesses often prioritize cost-cutting. When executive pressure mounts due to less favorable performance, cost-cutting typically becomes the primary strategy. Cost-cutting is a silo-based approach that tends to be more focused on resource management rather than value creation. Even when market conditions favor margin growth over revenue or customer growth, focusing on waste reduction is a more effective strategy than simply cutting costs. Also: 3 smart ways business leaders can build successful AI strategies - before it's too late Cost management was included in Gartner's top ten business priorities for 2025. According to Gartner, the top five actions CEOs are taking to safeguard organizational performance are led by pursuing cost-efficiency measures (77%), followed by adjusting pricing strategies (51%), and deploying fully automated, robotic, and AI systems (48%). AI is a top priority for CEOs, with 79% believing it will impact their industry in the next three years. However, there's a notable paradox: 18% of CEOs plan to decrease investment in people and culture development, and 31% are reducing hiring. This situation presents a real challenge. How can organizations achieve AI-driven transformation while simultaneously reducing investment in talent and training? The focus must be on removing waste: Salesforce research suggests that a significant portion of CFO budgets is dedicated to agentic AI investments. On average, CFOs report dedicating 25% of their current total AI budget to AI agents. Six out of 10 CFOs believe AI agents and digital labor are critical for competing in the current economic climate and will continue to be so. Almost two-thirds (64%) of CFOs report that AI agents and digital labor are influencing their approach to business spending. And over a third (35%) of CFOs acknowledge that AI necessitates a riskier mindset regarding technology investments. Also: Gen AI disillusionment looms, according to Gartner's 2025 Hype Cycle report CFOs also believe that AI investments are about accelerating productivity and boosting revenues. Most CFOs (74%) believe that AI agents will not only cut costs but also drive revenue. CFOs implementing AI agents expect these agents to increase company revenue by almost 20%, mostly because 55% of CFOs think AI agents will take on more strategic work than routine tasks. And finally, 72% of CFOs say AI agents will transform their business model. These figures highlight the significant potential of AI agents in both financial and strategic capacities within organizations. The growing investments in AI are aimed at removing wasteful activities in business, knowing the hidden costs associated with waste. Defining waste in business Waste, at its core, is using more resources than needed to accomplish a task, without being able to repurpose the excess. "Resources" here refers to anything with a non-zero cost to the business. Historically, human resources were the primary option, and companies focused on finding the most cost-effective labor, often through offshoring. However, with agentic AI now capable of performing certain tasks at the required success levels, the decision for companies shifts to determining whether AI or human agents are more cost-effective. While less technologically sophisticated companies might face upfront costs for infrastructure and expertise to implement AI, the long-term cost of not adapting will likely be much higher. Also: How Gemini's on-premise upgrade could help your enterprise and advance sovereign AI From a company's perspective, waste means overspending to complete work. For example, using human resources in a call center can be a "double waste" because employee time is more expensive than AI's and cannot be repurposed. Instead, AI can handle multiple calls simultaneously at a lower unit cost. Beyond just the company, waste also encompasses the underutilization of resources. If human resources are tied up in tasks that agentic AI can do, it's a waste of their capability to complete more value-oriented jobs, where human skills are still essential. We should also consider the employee's perspective. It's a waste of their time, skills, and future if they are engaged in tasks that AI could handle instead of roles that truly leverage their unique human abilities. While we haven't explicitly focused on the customer's perspective here, it's important to remember that customer satisfaction often defines the success level of a job, which ultimately drives the choice of resources. In essence, waste is directly related to how we perform jobs and use resources. Assuming resources have a cost, waste is either the overuse of resources for a job (where the excess cannot be reused) or the underuse of resources (failing to maximize their potential). Also: Stop using AI for these 9 work tasks - here's why Finally, we should also consider the inherent value of the job itself. Jobs further removed from providing customer value and generating revenue are less worthwhile. "Busy work" should be eliminated as it misuses resources that could be applied to more critical tasks. Ultimately, waste in any industry is the misuse of resources, whether through overuse, utilizing the wrong resources, or failing to realize their full potential. Since all resources have a cost, all waste is costly, though not all costs are wasteful. Identifying waste in business Identifying wasteful processes in business can be challenging. While accounting practices help us measure costs, not all forms of waste are easily identifiable or measurable. Business processes often lack formal scrutiny for assessing waste. The increasing complexity of business operations makes it hard to link activities to customer or stakeholder value. Additionally, people often prefer their own methods for tasks, even if these methods are more complicated or time-consuming than standardized approaches, making waste harder to pinpoint and eliminate. Also: 71% of Americans fear that AI will put 'too many people out of work permanently' Despite these difficulties, eliminating waste across all company operations helps to focus the organization on creating value for customers, the business itself, and other stakeholders. This process also improves resource flow, including data and decisions, and boosts responsiveness to new challenges and opportunities. Continuous waste elimination is a vital tool for sustainability and profitability, and it remains a valuable goal in any economic cycle. After more than a million customer conversations with AI agents at Salesforce, we have learned many lessons regarding the elimination of waste and the expansion of more value-oriented assignments to our workforce. The path to becoming an autonomous enterprise, using a hybrid workforce of humans and digital labor powered by AI agents, will help companies remove wasteful activities. All waste is costly. Smart and growing businesses will focus on waste reduction, not cost reduction. The goal is to create value at the speed of need -- and to do this, you cannot be wasteful in any way. This article was co-authored by Henry King, co-author of Boundless and a new book, Autonomous, Wiley, October 2025.