According to a recent study, tech executives are eager to improve their businesses with agentic AI, the more capable and dynamic AI technology compared to the traditional chatbot.
Tech leaders, while optimistic about AI, revealed their biggest concern to be data security and privacy. Research also found that companies are interested in upskilling their workforce to suit new tech and increase hiring as they adopt new tools.
Even though businesses continue to sprint towards AI adoption, there are still mixed results about whether AI is a guaranteed success-maker.
Tech Executives Want AI Agents in The Workplace Quickly
Tech companies and leaders are moving fast to bring AI agents into the workplace, according to the latest Ernst & Young Technology Pulse Poll. The poll surveyed more than 500 tech leaders in April 2025.
Findings were centered around the deployment of AI, and about half (48%) of respondents reported that they had at least started to deploy agentic AI within their organization. Likewise, half of respondents said within their company, 50% of their AI deployment will be autonomous in the next 2 years.
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Tech leaders appear to be turning towards AI agents, over the traditional chatbot, seeing the former as a more capable and lucrative form of AI.
While chatbots such as Anthropic’s Claude are geared more towards interactivity, agentic AI agents favor autonomy and the performance of complex tasks, which could make it a highly useful tool within businesses.
Security and Upskilling On Leaders’ Minds in Regard to AI
Significantly, 49% of tech leaders surveyed named their top AI-related concern as data privacy and security, a number which is 19 percentage points higher than it was in 2024.
This number prevails despite the fact that 73% of leaders said they have security and privacy governance risk frameworks in place to monitor AI-driven decisions. Brian Hopkins, vice president of Forrester’s Emerging Tech portfolio, wrote about security within AI in a blog post: “Clear boundaries, governance, and trust frameworks must evolve alongside the tech.”
Businesses are also interested in changing their workforce in relation to new technologies. The vast majority of tech leaders (84%) said they were planning on hiring more workers over the next six months, as they adopt more AI tools.
Well over half of respondents likewise said they’re focusing on upskilling their current workforce as AI technology becomes common practice.
The Race for AI Implementation Continues
Everywhere we’re looking, companies are tripping over themselves trying to implement AI technology before their competition. In a figure that can’t be taken too seriously, more than half (58%) of executive respondents believe their organization is ahead of competitors in AI investment.
It doesn’t help that many reports, such as Microsoft’s latest report on Frontier Firms, carry a sense of urgency — that businesses should rush to implement AI, or risk being left behind. However, this kind of panic has caused many businesses to implement AI purely for that reason, even when they are not seeing significant return on investment.
Despite the mania, leaders remain optimistic about the positives of AI, even amid increasing pressures “to demonstrate return on investment now through measurement and tangible top-line and bottom-line results,” according to Ernst & Young.
