Technical debt may no longer be the albatross around the neck of businesses as artificial intelligence agents come into the mainstream, according to two execs from NTT Data.
NTT’s chief executive for Australia and NZ David McKeering, along with NTT’s vice president of digital Tal Nathan, explained to techpartner.news that enterprise businesses were engaged in an 'arms race' to unlock agentic AI.
Nathan said it was a mistake to think about agentic AI purely as a technology that could be added to an existing stack.
“AI will fundamentally re-platform and transform the way organisations operate, trade, engage with their stakeholders," he said.
"It's going to be a fundamental shift in operations, operational structure, organisational structure, the way revenue is generated, the way costs are expanded."
One major benefit of unlocking AI agents at scale would be addressing the challenge of tech debt, they both claimed.
Technical debt describes older technology that often houses vital systems but lacks modern flexibility or interoperability, yet is too expensive or difficult to replace.
AI agents may be able to overcome those challenges as they move throughout a system autonomously, acting and reacting dynamically to whatever they encounter, collecting and moving data, and communicating with any other system or application, according to the duo.
“Gen(erative) AI could build scaffolding around that technical debt to still allow you to drive that digital transformation while leveraging automation and other mechanisms to work around that technical debt," Nathan said.
The execs outlined two major barriers that organisations are facing, aside from technical challenges, in the development of AI agents.
First is realising value; Nathan said in his experience, only about 2% of any AI implementations make it into production and can show positive return on investment.
He suggested that organisations shouldn’t get hung up on numbers and instead focus on “qualitative value”.
“It's not to say that cost savings cannot be found, but that cannot be the primary measure," he told techpartner.news.
"Most organisations that seek that as the primary measure generally find out the hard way that it's not the case, and quite often, it's actually more expensive.
“But if they quantify the value of that additional expense, they might still be better off because they are a more efficient organisation delivering a better customer/employee experience.”
Second is a perennial concern for all new technologies: security and governance.
Nathan said NTT is seeing “tremendous” demand from organisations for practical advice on how to deploy agents safely and securely.
“How do you give an agent that isn't a human access into your systems, privileged access to access information, access to systems and to make transactions on behalf of an individual?" he said.
“We're working really aggressively and quite successfully in terms of building these governance models and guardrails in place that allows organisations to have a human in the loop construct leveraging this agency capability."
Nathan explained that he truly believes that once the challenges are worked through, agentic AI will cause a massive shift in organisational capability.
“It isn't a buzzword; it's organisations that can legitimately automate processes through a mesh of agents working in harmony together, with security and privacy at the centre of it," he said.
"Those organisations will leapfrog exponentially the competitors that don't have those foundations in place outside."
The Japanese-based IT services giant also recently announced AI-specific partnerships with Google Cloud and French large language model vendor Mistral.
McKeering said the partnerships were about becoming a “genuine, truly global IT services company”.
"It's incredibly important for us to be that full strategic tech advisor to our clients, which is not just about tech, but it's about how to use the tech to solve the business outcomes or business challenges,” he said.
He added that NTT was looking to partner with more Australia IT providers moving forward.
“There is absolutely a local partnership network that we need to make sure that we're investing in," McKeering said.
"Any IT services provider that would like to call government a client of their firms needs to be really serious around the investment needed to be made in-country around that data sovereignty."
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