Actual, Real, Useful Agents: Bella Liu (Orby) and Eoin Hinchy (Tines)

Bella Liu of Orby and Eoin Hinchy of Tines, both of whom are in the agent business, noted that enterprise customers remain nervous about unsupervised agents running around their IT infrastructure, even as they’re thrilled about the pruductivity potential. Liu said most Orby agents currently operated with humans in the loop, though the tools do 90% of the work and have “very granular control settings” to prevent rogue behavior. Hinchy said the key to building trust would be transparency — enabling the customer to see what data is flowing to the agent and what’s coming back. He stressed that agents were essentially an extension of process automation, and would yield huge gains in productivity. He cited a SaaS company that was able to use an agent to massively decrease the work involved in reviewing code for security problems. Liu gave an example of a healthcare system that was able to dramatically speed up and simplify the on-boarding of new doctors and other providers, which traditionally requires teams of people handling extensive paperwork.