AI agents present a new iteration of automation. Founders are rapidly standing up agentic applications that can solve specific needs in functions like sales and customer success – without a human in the loop. Meanwhile, software buyers seeing real opportunity to quickly improve their P&L are quickly building or purchasing agentic products. In recent months, investors have been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars in capital into startups in the space, including previously unthinkable $200 million seed rounds.
Europe is home to many of these exciting companies, including Cogna, Lovable, Gradient Labs AI, 11x, and Zylon, as you can see from our market map. (We also interviewed the founders of these five companies – for their insights read our piece here.)
AI agents mark a step-change from Robotic Process Automation (RPA) bots, which have several limitations due to their deterministic nature. Next-generation AI agents can learn from mistakes and adjust their series of tasks, which means that they can transform the journey from intent to implementation in software development through delivering “pure work”, rather than acting only as a helpful co-pilot. We believe that the rise of AI agents is not only an opportunity to expand automation beyond what is possible with RPA, but to more broadly redefine how knowledge work is performed. These agents are about to revolutionise the world of work as we know it, and they are already getting started. For example, Klarna recently revealed that its AI agent system handled two-thirds of customer chats in its first month in operation.
- The companies we support are already capitalising on the potential of AI agents. Dataiku, whose platform for Everyday AI is used by enterprises worldwide, has shared thoughts on how to make the transition from RPA bots to useful AI agents in this Chatbots to Agents blog – with a reusable example demonstrating the creation and use of an interactive AI Agent here.
- Read the insights from five founders mentioned above on the AI Agents about to join your team here.