Enterprise leaders at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech AI conference, held April 21-23 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, delivered a consistent message: 2026 is the year agentic AI moves from integration experiments to production execution, TechTarget reported.
Andrew Bialecki, co-founder and co-CEO of Klaviyo, a marketing AI platform drawing on data from over 200,000 businesses, said this is the year enterprises need to deploy agents if they haven’t already. “This is going to be the year like when everybody discovered Claude and ChatGPT last year, but this year everybody will go to a website and expect a similar experience, but one that’s trained on that business’s information,” he told the conference, per TechTarget.
ServiceNow’s Internal Results
Kellie Romack, ServiceNow’s chief digital information officer, shared specific production numbers from the company’s internal agent deployment. ServiceNow built AI agents to handle service desk operations and achieved a 90% improvement in service request resolution from first touch, exceeding the project’s original target of 85%, which Romack called “audacious,” according to TechTarget.
The deployment did not reduce service desk headcount. ServiceNow moved 85% of service desk employees to higher-level roles, with the remainder becoming managers of the AI agents who handle cases the agents can’t resolve.
Romack described a concrete workflow transformation: ServiceNow’s 9,000 sales employees needed real-time access to compensation plan status. The finance team was overwhelmed with requests, and responses took four days. After redesigning the process with agentic AI, the response time dropped to eight seconds.
“We talked about it as humans, reinvented the process, put agentic AI to work and moved a four-day process to eight seconds,” Romack told the conference, per TechTarget.
The Process Reinvention Argument
Romack emphasized that stacking AI on top of existing processes doesn’t work. The productivity gains come from rethinking workflows before deploying agents. “People fear what they don’t understand, so part of my job for our employees, customers and partners is to move AI from a black box to a glass box,” she said, per TechTarget.
Ash Edwards, head of forward-deployed research engineering at London-based AI lab Poolside, highlighted background agents as the most significant category. These are agents that handle bug fixes, reporting, and administrative tasks that occupy developer and sales team time without being core to their roles.
“It’s never been a more fun time to be a software engineer because you have an idea and before you might have had five different directions and you had to pick one to do,” Edwards told the conference, per TechTarget. “Now you can literally try all five and get much more exploration, which means you can be much more creative.”
The Competitive Pressure
The conference’s overall framing positioned 2026 agent deployment decisions as defining competitive positioning for the next three to five years. Bialecki described a future where every business deploys an “infinitely scalable” agent that handles thousands of tasks and understands the minutiae of company processes.
For marketing specifically, Bialecki said agents are inverting the traditional outbound model. Instead of businesses pushing messages to customers, customers are arriving with questions, and agents match them with relevant products and services. “This is extending what businesses traditionally thought of as customer service and is driving incremental engagement or sales revenue to that business,” he said, per TechTarget.
The ServiceNow example provides a measurable reference point for enterprises evaluating agent ROI. A 90% resolution improvement and a four-day-to-eight-second workflow transformation, delivered without layoffs, is the kind of case study that moves procurement conversations forward.