AI innovations in the form of agents are promising new levels of automation that require little to no human interaction, targeting DevOps team members facing the arduous task of digital transformations. AI agents promise to transform the process of application development and to ease the burden of app and infrastructure modernization complexities.
Application platform providers are laser focused on enterprise developers with their first round of high-productivity agentic tools currently in release. AI assistants and copilots are transforming into tools that create customized agents, unleashing new capabilities for streamlining integrations with workflows, speed the application development lifecycle, and support multi-agent orchestration and management.
In 2025 organizations are pivoting from building deterministic workflows to implementing AI agents that learn, adapt, make decisions, and perform complex tasks using reasoning and longer-term memory. AI agents represent a new era of AI and GenAI because they act autonomously as independent agents, which can prove to be highly valuable among developers who work in fast-paced and dynamic software development environments. And while AI agents can autonomously complete tasks on behalf of users, agentic AI promises even greater automation to a range of complex tasks transforming business processes. They are designed to solve problems, attack tasks with minimal human input, and learn and become even more effective over time.
This unprecedented reliance on AI by a much broader audience of participants will heavily impact the market. GlobalData predicts that the overall AI market will see a 35% increase in 2025 over 2024, with a compound annual growth rate of 41% from 2023 to 2028. The agentic AI segment is expected to play a massive role in this growth.
Recent events have triggered an uptick in agentic activity including Microsoft’s autonomous agent enhancement to its popular Copilot AI assistant, which integrates with GitHub products, immediately targeting an audience of 15 million developers. Further, Google added agent development capabilities to its flagship Vertex AI portfolio of developer tools, since adding Agent Development Kit for building multi-agent systems, as well as introducing the new A2A protocol.
Rivals have joined the fray. Amazon Q Developer features agents that automate unit testing, documentation, and code reviews, accessed via AWS Management Console and offered through GitLab. Salesforce continues to evolve Agentforce through integrations with its developer platforms and business apps, to help organizations deploy autonomous AI agents across business functions such as customer support, sales, finance, and marketing.