The Transformative Power of ‘Thinking’ AI and the Implications for Business

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to get more intelligent, which holds the potential for reshaping how businesses operate. The next generation of innovation involves agentic AI. These are autonomous AI systems that can perceive their environment, reason, make decisions, and take actions to achieve goals, moving beyond simple information retrieval to perform complex, multistep tasks. Unlike reactive AI, agentic AI acts proactively, anticipating needs and orchestrating processes across different systems to drive business impact and automate workflows. These advancements promise to usher in a new era of enterprise automation and intelligent decision-making.

A recent survey revealed that 88 percent of respondents plan to increase AI-related budgets in the next 12 months due to agentic AI. Of those queried, 79 percent indicated AI agents are already being deployed in their businesses, while 66 percent claimed such agents are already delivering measurable value through increased productivity. 75 percent agreed or strongly agreed that AI agents are poised to transform the workplace more than the internet did.

These AI agents are rapidly taking on real-world tasks across industries, from booking travel to assisting in healthcare diagnostics. But as these intelligent agents transform operations, they also introduce a new level of complexity that threatens the very performance and reliability businesses depend on. This shines a light on the growing importance of observability. Far more than a technical necessity, observability is emerging as a direct driver of business value.

Why Visibility Equals Value

In today’s business environment, digital services aren’t just supportive tools—they are increasingly becoming the backbone of operations. If these systems falter, the consequences are immediate and costly. In finance, a moment of downtime can mean missed trades. In healthcare, it could delay a diagnosis. In logistics and retail, it might translate into lost revenue and damaged customer trust.

The growing use of AI agents amplifies both the opportunity and the risk for enterprises. Because intelligent agents make decisions on their own, drawing from distributed systems and real-time data, they can dramatically streamline workflows and improve efficiency. But when things go wrong, they don’t raise a flag like a human user might. Without visibility into how they operate, organizations face blind spots that threaten revenue, customer experience, and reputation. Observability bridges this gap, ensuring businesses can harness automation without losing control.

Successful Automation Requires Observability

AI agents, by their very nature, operate differently than other AI systems. Today’s new AI-driven architecture, which includes specialized chips, containerized cloud environments, large language models, and agents, creates deep interdependencies. Even if each piece functions properly, breakdowns in communication between them can degrade performance. The impact of such breakdowns will inevitably have business consequences, calling into question the expected return on investment.

Unfortunately, traditional monitoring tools, designed for simpler systems, are no match for this level of complexity. AI agents generate encrypted, transient, and machine-to-machine API traffic patterns that are invisible to older tools. Without a modern approach to observability, companies risk being unable to see if their systems are performing as intended. Observability isn’t just helpful—it’s essential.

The Business Case for Observability

An observability solution that delivers end-to-end visibility can empower businesses with actionable intelligence about how services are working together. This, in turn, allows proactive problem detection, enabling repairs before customers or partners are impacted, keeping operations running smoothly, and protecting the customer experience. It can also be crucial for reducing downtime, thereby lowering the financial and reputational cost of outages. Ultimately, since AI agents are all about making their own intelligent decisions, it is essential that they are grounded in reliable, real-time data about system performance. In other words, observability translates directly into business outcomes: resilience, efficiency, and competitive advantage.

True Resilience: Where Observability Meets Security

As AI takes on a greater role for many businesses, resilience is imperative. This need highlights the important convergence of observability and security. Instead of treating them as separate silos, they can be converged into a unified approach to resilience. This isn’t just about keeping the lights on. It’s about ensuring systems can detect, adapt, and recover from challenges automatically, whether those challenges come from a cyberthreat or a technical hiccup.

The business value of such resilience can’t be underestimated. Companies that build this into their digital foundations will be better positioned to move fast, innovate confidently, and serve customers reliably. When observability and security work together, companies can minimize risk, protect customer trust, and ensure continuity even as networks grow more complex.

Positioning Your Business to Maximize Agentic AI Success

The rise of agentic AI presents one of the largest opportunities—and the largest risks—since the cloud revolution. Businesses that treat observability as a strategic investment, and not just an IT function, will be the ones to capture the upside.

NETSCOUT’s observability solution is ideally suited for this task. By capturing packet data—the foundational building blocks of digital interactions—NETSCOUT enables companies to generate trustworthy metadata and gain insights even in highly dynamic environments. That level of precision means fewer operational surprises, more-stable customer experiences, and ultimately stronger business outcomes.

In today’s increasingly complex network environments, observability isn’t just about technology. It’s about safeguarding revenue, protecting trust, and enabling growth. For businesses navigating the AI-driven future, observability equals resilience—and resilience equals business value.

For a deeper dive into agentic AI and the implications of observability in pursuit of automation success, read this recent Forbes article.