MANILA - After all the excitement about Generative AI, companies in the Asia-Pacific region will shift from "trend chasing" into trying to unlock real value from artificial intelligence, according to IBM Philippines.

One major trend will be the shift in focus from Gen AI to agentic AI, said IBM Philippines President and Technology Leader Aileen Judan-Jiao.

While businesses use Gen AI mainly to generate "content" such as marketing copy, product designs, images, audio and video, the promise of agentic AI or intelligent agents is doing real tasks like driving a car autonomously, planning a trip overseas while making all the travel arrangements, or having an online chat with a customer and understanding what the client is asking and solving that problem instead of just repeating a script.

Judan-Jiao said intelligent agents also go beyond merely assisting humans as they can do tasks without needing to be instructed.

"It will eventually shift to a lot more 'intelligence beyond assistance'- it will be agents that are actually using AI to do the work," Judan-Jiao said.

IBM said businesses will "increasingly devise agentic workflows, powered by AI agents, to autonomously execute tasks, collaborate with human workers and drive value across the business."

She said intelligent agents will also continue to learn, even correct themselves and can even go beyond what humans are asking them to do.

"If you keep asking questions about research, this and that. When it finds research out there that has been published about your interest areas, it will feed it to you without you asking. You see the difference?" she said.

IBM said agentic AI, which combines AI with automation, has the potential to achieve significant gains in operational efficiency, customer experience and decision-making. However also said organizations will still need to set up internal guardrails to ensure ethical and responsible use of these agents.

Judan Jiao said that after the Gen AI boom in 2023, companies experimented a lot on how to use the technology in their businesses. This continued in 2024 in what she called "trend chasing."

However, in 2025, companies will begin deploying AI towards strategic goals based on competitive advantage and improved ROI. IBM said there will be a trend towards "rightsizing" using smaller, more targeted AI.

"Purpose-built models will be in demand, including those designed for local languages, nuanced regional contexts and simpler computational tasks," IBM said.