When you think of the term “AI agent,” you might think of a robot wearing a headset. (Just us?)
Regardless, AI agents are a new and potentially revolutionary arrival on the tech scene, and we’ve teamed up with Deloitte to help explain their role within core modernization.
So, AI agents. What are they exactly, and what can they help organizations do? Deloitte’s Tech Trends 2025 helps us answer these questions.
Let’s talk tech.
Creating change at the core
According to Deloitte’s Tech Trends 2025, the integration of AI into core enterprise systems represents a significant shift in how businesses operate and leverage tech to gain a competitive edge.
As a result, many core systems providers have gone all in on AI, fashioning their offerings and capabilities around an AI-first model. For years, core and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms were most businesses’ single source of truth. If someone had a question about any aspect of enterprise operations or performance, from suppliers to customers, the core had the answer.
But reaching properly contextualized insights (the “why” behind the data) in near real-time hasn’t really been on the table for executive teams.
That, folks, is where AI agents come in.
Agentic AI is not just augmenting this data interaction model; it’s fundamentally challenging people-technology relationships. Users don’t necessarily have to go directly to core systems for answers to their operational questions anymore, but rather, they can lean on a new type of digital workforce.
AI agents can reach into core systems and deeply understand an enterprise’s operations, its processes, and replicate its business logic. They can ultimately manage transactional work autonomously and at great speed to provide human workforces with what they need to know before they know they need it. This in turn can inform better decision making.
While this technology is still developing and evolving, AI agents can perform many core functions today, from transaction processing, to workflow automation, to anomaly detection and resolution, to problem solving.
For example, a customer service-focused AI agent can interact with customers, understand their problem, and diagnose the solution. You may have seen adjacent versions of this in various customer service bots, and if that leaves you skeptical, we don’t blame you. But in this model, the agent may then be able to interact with another agent that can take actions, like handling returns or shipping new items. Your issue could actually be solved on the spot, rather than shuffled around or talked about in a circle.
According to Tech Trends 2025, luxury retailer Saks’ customer service bots can already interact with ordering and inventory systems to smooth out the delivery of items bought online, ease returns, and empower customer service representatives to focus on larger tasks. (Because if there’s anyone who deserves a sidekick, it’s a customer service rep.)
In an agentic future, Deloitte notes that we can expect to see more agents working together as part of multi-agent systems to execute complex work across a myriad of enterprise functions and sector domains. Maintaining core systems then becomes about overseeing a fleet of AI agents.
A fleet that can’t be beat?
Our ways of work can transform over the next decade as a result of AI agents’ efficiency, gap filling, and speed. And with the essential oversight of human touch, AI agents—much like a film, TV, or literary agent—can facilitate the right connections and industry knowledge. When you consider that this agent operates 24/7 and globally, you’ve got quite the backing.
Take Zora AITM by Deloitte, for example. By functioning as part of integrated multi-agent systems and combining the ability to perceive, reason, and act, the Zora AI platform includes a suite of agents that can:
- Source, extract, and interpret real-time multimodal data from structured and unstructured sources.
- Run the analytical and mathematical models to define related insights and trends.
- Translate insights into easily consumable formats while providing scenario analysis and recs to help advise on business-critical decisions.
- Coordinate and perform a set of actions by collaborating with other agents to execute complex, nuanced workflows from beginning to end, including transaction processing and anomaly detection and resolution.
With core systems and ERP platforms still increasingly seen as a single source of truth, heavy reliance on monolithic, critical implementations can be alleviated by enabling new channels and workflows to thrive via AI agents’ work.
Call my agent
AI agents are ready for work, which means your team can be ready for more time spent making confident decisions that drive value and less time poring over manual tasks and ERP intricacies.
AI is fundamentally challenging the core/enterprise resource system model with new functionalities, and with new ways of work come new questions. But here and now, one answer rings true: AI agents can bridge the gap between the old and the new.
To learn more, explore Deloitte’s Technology and Innovation offerings to stay on the cutting edge of tomorrow’s solutions.