2026 to be the year of the agentic AI intern

After several years of experimentation, enterprise AI is moving out of the pilot phase. To date, many organisations limit AI to general-purpose chatbots, often created by small groups of early adopters. According to Nexos.ai, that model will give way to something more operational: fleets of task-specific AI agents embedded directly into business workflows.

Even isolated agents are in common use, screening CVs, reviewing contracts, drafting routine correspondence, preparing management reports and orchestrating actions in enterprise systems.

Analysis from the company suggests organisations that move from single chatbots to multiple role-specific agents see materially higher adoption and claim a clearer business impact. Teams interact with agents that can behave like junior colleagues, where each agent is accountable for a defined slice of work.

Every team gets its own named agent

The company’s studies envisage the normalisation of named AI agents assigned on a per team basis, which it describes as an “AI intern”. These are not general-purpose assistants, but dedicated tools for specific operational processes.

For example, HR teams might deploy agents tuned to recruitment criteria, or legal teams using agents configured to flag contract standard violations. Sales teams will rely on agents optimised for their sales pipelines and integrated with an existing CRM. In each case, Nexos says the business value comes from contextual awareness and integration with existing software and date, rather than from advances in the raw power of the model.

Early enterprise deployments suggest the gains can be significant. Payhawk, for example, reports that its deployment of Nexos.ai’s agentic platform in finance, customer support, and operations reduced the necessary security investigation time by 80%. The company achieved 98% data accuracy and cut its processing costs by 75%.

Žilvinas Girėnas, head of product at Nexos.ai, says the real benefit stems from coordination. “The shift from single-purpose agents to coordinated AI teams is fundamental. Businesses are […] building groups of specialised agents that work together in a workflow. That’s when AI stops being a pilot and starts becoming infrastructure.”

Platform consolidation becomes unavoidable

As the number of active agents in organisations rises, a second-order problem – fragmentation – appears. Teams running five to ten agents in different tools face duplicate costs and inconsistency in security controls. From the perspective of IT governance, this situation can become unsustainable.

Evidence from early Nexos adopters suggests consolidating agents on a enterprise-wide shared platform delivers faster deployment – in some cases twice as fast – and gives better oversight over spend and performance.

Girėnas says: “When teams are juggling multiple vendors and logins, usage drops. A single platform is what allows organisations to extract consistent value rather than paying for shelfware.”

The situation points to pattern familiar to enterprise technology veterans: AI agent systems follow the same trajectory of consolidation seen in collaboration, security, and analytics stacks.

AI operations shifts to the business

The company’s findings suggest that the ownership of AI operations is moving from engineering teams and towards business leaders and discrete business functions. The function-specific deployment model means heads of HR, legal, finance, and sales are will expected to configure their own agents, a task that include prompt management. Thus, the ability to manage agents will become a core operational competency for individuals and business functions.

This places new requirements on agentic platforms, with the need for interfaces that are approachable by non-technical users, with the stack operating with minimal reliance on APIs or developer-style tooling. Team leads will need to be able to adjust instructions, test outputs from their adopted systems and find ways to scale successful configurations. Engineering support will be reserved for isolated problem-solving.

Demand will outstrip delivery capacity

Nexos.ai’s final prediction is the appearance of a capacity challenge. It says that once teams can deploy their first few agents successfully, demand for similar systems will accelerate in the organisation. Marketing departments may look for workflow automation, finance pros will want compliance-checking agents, and customer success teams will explore the effects of support triage: Each department, seeing proven value elsewhere, will expect similar abilities and efficiencies.

Industry projections suggest that by the end of 2026, around 40% of enterprise software applications will incorporate task-specific AI agents, up from under 5% in 2024. Engineering capacity is unlikely to keep pace if every agent is built from scratch – thus the call for centralised capability.

“The organisations that cope best will be those with agent libraries rather than bespoke builds,” Girėnas says. “Templates, playbooks, and pre-built agents are the only way to meet rising demand without overwhelming delivery teams.”

(Image source: “Office Assistant” by LornaJane.net is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.)

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