Suddenly, businesses are pouring cash into agentic AI. A survey from PwC shows that it’s not just organizations at the forefront of emerging technologies that are making this kind of move; it’s widespread. Eighty-eight percent of senior executives said their team or business function plans to increase AI budgets within a year due to agentic AI, and 79% said they’re already adopting AI agents.
The desire to build out agentic AI makes sense. This technology offers an advanced level of automation, adapts to new data, and operates autonomously, allowing for all sorts of tasks to be completed more quickly than ever. It frees up humans to take on more complex tasks that require their involvement and intervention.
So it’s no surprise that organizations are already reporting results. At businesses that have adopted AI agents, two-thirds of executives told PwC they’re seeing increased productivity; 57% reported cost savings. And when it comes to the most important metric of all, the customer experience (CX), 54% said they’re seeing improvement.
If you go by the hype, you might think agentic AI is guaranteed to help any business tower over its competitors. But businesses need to realize something crucial: any tower is only as strong as the foundation it’s built on. This is where many are going wrong.
Siloed data
Agentic AI, like the power of any technology designed to improve your business, relies on the data it can access. To maximize the chances of fulfilling customers’ requests or resolving their pain points, the AI needs to know everything about what they’ve bought in the past; what their challenges have been; how other customers in similar situations have found resolutions, and a lot more. And it needs updated, real time information to keep learning and improving.
At Nextiva, our 2025 survey of more than 1,000 CX leaders found that many businesses are suffering from tool overload. More than half told us their companies use five tools or more. Thirteen percent said their companies use more than 10 different CX tools. In addition to causing tech debt, this overload brings an even bigger problem: siloed data. The vast majority (86%) of companies using multiple CX tools told us they wrestle with data silos, which makes it difficult if not impossible to get a holistic view of any customer.
No matter how intelligent an AI agent may be, it can easily make the wrong decisions when it doesn’t have enough information. It can fail to adapt, frustrating customers even more. In short, it can backfire.
The omnichannel solution
The key to solving this is to bring all communications into a single place. Rather than operating with separate platforms that fail to integrate, people across the company should operate within the same communications system.
Businesses need omnichannel communications that pull together everything. When a customer interacts with the brand in an app, messaging, email, phone call, or any other way, all that information should automatically enter a single record. Generative AI can piece through those records in real time, extracting key insights to help human and AI agents deliver the best results.
But omnichannel communications shouldn’t be limited just to customer-facing teams and functions. These days, back office functions also play a crucial role in delivering the best customer experiences. In our survey, respondents told us they see operations, IT, legal, finance, and other departments as being vital to CX. The information they collect and provide can go even further in strengthening AI agents.
When people across an organization work together within a unified customer experience management platform (UCXM), they all glean a better understanding of what customers are going through, and of how to improve — and the organization’s AI tools gain that same understanding. So simply by working each day within the same ecosystem, they strengthen the ground the agentic AI is built on.
In the PwC survey, 73% of senior executives agreed that how their organizations use AI agents “will give them a significant competitive advantage in the coming 12 months.” They’re probably right. As so many organizations move forward into this new future, what will distinguish them will be the specific ways in which they tap into agentic AI.
So for businesses, this moment marks a profound opportunity. If they end data siloes and empower agentic AI to operate with the knowledge it needs, they’re much more likely to achieve an advantage. For the ones smart enough to move in this direction, the sky’s the limit.