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The chatter around artificial general intelligence (AGI) may dominate headlines coming from Silicon Valley companies like OpenAI, Meta and xAI, but for enterprise leaders on the ground, the focus is squarely on practical applications and measurable results. At VentureBeat’s recent Transform 2025 event in San Francisco, a clear picture emerged: the era of real, deployed agentic AI is here, is accelerating and it’s already reshaping how businesses operate.
Companies like Intuit, Capital One, LinkedIn, Stanford University and Highmark Health are quietly putting AI agents into production, tackling concrete problems, and seeing tangible returns. Here are the four biggest takeaways from the event for technical decision-makers.
1. AI Agents are moving into production, faster than anyone realized
Enterprises are now deploying AI agents in customer-facing applications, and the trend is accelerating at a breakneck pace. A recent VentureBeat survey of 2,000 industry professionals conducted just before VB Transform revealed that 68% of enterprise companies (with 1,000+ employees) had already adopted agentic AI – a figure that seemed high at the time. (In fact, I worried it was too high to be credible, so when I announced the survey results on the event stage, I cautioned that the high adoption may be a reflection of VentureBeat’s specific readership.)
However, new data validates this rapid shift. A KPMG survey released on June 26, a day after our event, shows that 33% of organizations are now deploying AI agents, a surprising threefold increase from just 11% in the previous two quarters. This market shift validates the trend VentureBeat first identified just weeks ago in its pre-Transform survey.
This acceleration is being fueled by tangible results. Ashan Willy, CEO of New Relic, noted a staggering 30% quarter over quarter growth in monitoring AI applications by its customers, mainly because of the its customers’ move to adopt agents. Companies are deploying AI agents to help customers automate workflows they need help with. Intuit, for instance, has deployed invoice generation and reminder agents in its QuickBooks software. The result? Businesses using the feature are getting paid five days faster and are 10% more likely to be paid in full.
Even non-developers are feeling the shift. Scott White, the product lead of Anthropic’s Claude AI product, described how he, despite not being a professional programmer, is now building production-ready software features himself. “This wasn’t possible six months ago,” he explained, highlighting the power of tools like Claude Code. Similarly, OpenAI’s head of product for its API platform, Olivier Godement, detailed how customers like Stripe and Box are using its Agents SDK to build out multi-agent systems.
2. The hyperscaler race has n …