“If you hold back the usage, you kill your company, because competition is just pulling apart by 20 percent a year. And within two years, you’re dead”. Those words, by CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, Nicolai Tangen, cut straight to the heart of today’s business reality; companies that hesitate to embrace AI risk watching enabled rivals dominate.

My experience running an AI Agent company is that it is difficult for companies to get their head around AI adoption at the company level. AI Agents have been successful out of the gate because they solve that issue; companies can take one step at a time, proving value with each agent. The risk is hovering in the pilot stage, waiting to see, run a pilot here, then wait to see if it sticks. In Tangen’s warning, that waiting room is a death trap.

Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick indicates leadership matters more than any technology. “A leader who uses AI will make sure AI seems critical. Someone who doesn’t is kind of a problem.” When executives ask AI questions in meetings, celebrate early wins, and make adoption visible, the entire culture shifts. Every project that is not top priority signals to employees and customers that AI is nice to have, not need to have.

The path to survival is clear. First, embed AI Agents into daily workflows so that it becomes indispensable. Start by automating data consolidation and analysis. Generate routine reports with a single instruction. Make every critical team: finance, human resources, operations, legal, and IT, leverage AI Agents as much as they depend on a spreadsheet, database, or email today. Invest in your people by equipping them with AI agents that handle repetitive work and allow them to surface insights themselves.

Recognize that model performance evolves at breakneck speed, 100x in the past two years. You cannot expect a small company to benchmark every new release, so the goal becomes, how do you continuously evaluate optimal models and techniques fit to each of your custom tasks? How do you stay in front without draining resources?

At iClerk, we built our Agents to address exactly these challenges. One agent at a time, you prove value through automated data consolidation, generative reporting, and secure access to private information. You empower leaders with traceable analytics and give every employee a reliable AI partner.

Get on the bus. And the smart money says hesitation is fatal. Leaders who embrace AI as a strategic growth engine will not only survive, but outperform.

Let intelligent automation save your business, one agent at a time.

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