Organizations say they want AI agents but lack infrastructure to support the shift, requiring fundamental redesign of technology, workforce, and success metrics.

85% of organizations say they want to be agentic within the next three years, but 76% say their current operations and infrastructure cannot support that change, citing a lack of readiness across people, processes, and workflows.

Ema and HFS Research coined the term 'agentic business transformation' (ABT) to describe the enterprise-wide redesign needed—spanning technology stack, workforce structure, and outcome-focused metrics—rather than simply layering AI agents (autonomous systems that can execute tasks and make decisions with limited human input) onto existing operations.

In early deployments across customer service, HR, and sales, AI agents are estimated to accelerate business processes by as much as 30% to 50% and reduce low-value work time by 25% to 40% when deployed at scale, but one Ema enterprise customer tripled measured ROI within two quarters after switching from activity metrics (e.g., cost per query) to outcome metrics (e.g., percentage of contracts reviewed without human escalation).