While agentic AI definitely marks a turning point in human-computer interaction, moving from tool use to collaboration, the next step is integrating these agents and actually deriving value. At VentureBeat’s Transform 2025, Matthew Kropp, managing director and senior partner at BCG, offered a game plan for workflow evolution, employee adoption, and organizational change.
“The companies that are at the top of this curve — what we call future built, the ones that are most mature — are seeing substantial results: 1.5 times more revenue growth, 1.8 times higher shareholder value,” Kropp said. “There’s value here, but we’re early.”
Deploy, reshape, invent
To take advantage and create value with AI and with agents, a company needs to determine where to focus, using a deploy, reshape, invent framework. AI is already being deployed in every enterprise, and will have agents within the next few years. But if you give an employee a chatbot, you haven’t changed the way the work is done. You have to rethink the work, and reshape functions, departments, and workflows by identifying where human work can be automated.
“We’re advising companies right now to focus on your three or four big rocks. If you have a big customer support organization, you should apply AI in customer support. It has a huge impact. If you have a big engineering organization, you should employ tools like Windsurf to reshape the way that you do engineering, software development.”
Invention is still in the very early stage, but enterprises should be thinking about how to use AI’s ability to be creative, reason, and plan. Look at services and products, and how you interact with customers: can you reinvent that using those capabilities?”
For instance, makeup company L’Oreal launched a virtual beauty advisor to scale that exclusive service beyond their retail locations, reinventing the way they think about interacting with their customers at scale.
Thinking beyond basic use cases
It’s also critical to think about how AI changes your business. There’s been a lot of focus in the last couple of years on cost reduction by replacing workers, but that isn’t big-picture thinking. AI amplifies the employees you currently have, dramatically increasing their productivity.
“This is what we’re seeing in software development,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll see companies laying off their software developers. We’re going to see a massive explosion in the amount of capability and features that software companies are building.”
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