The Great Opportunity for Agentic Organizations in Generating ROI with AI

The corporate adoption rate of artificial intelligence has reached historic levels. However, the real return margin remains alarmingly stagnant.

According to recent data from McKinsey, 88% of organizations already use AI in at least one business function, but only 39% report a measurable impact on corporate EBIT. To worsen the scenario, Gartner predicts that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, driven by rising costs, lack of value clarity, and insufficient controls.

AI brings increasingly mature models, and yet, companies are unable to achieve the expected ROI (Return on Investment). What is the problem after all?

The real problem

Applying intelligent agents to processes and organizational structures designed for the pre-AI era is repeating a known mistake: applying a technology of the future to a business logic of the past.

Simply coupling AI agents, copilots, and PoCs directly onto the current digital organization results in silos of systems and applications being replaced by silos of agents. The sum of isolated experiments does not organically generate a smarter company. So, what to do?

From digital organization to agentic organization

AI fundamentally alters the distribution of intelligence within companies. In the digital organization, the center was software, where systems were designed to serve the organization. In the agentic organization, the center becomes the company itself, its knowledge, its human roles, its processes, and its architecture.

In this new model, the fundamental unit of value is no longer the software delivered or the platform implemented, but the organizational capability.

These capabilities emerge from the synergistic work between human teams and intelligent agents endowed with context, purpose, identity, and their own internal governance architecture, which overcome the reductionist view of an agent isolated from tasks.

The 4 pillars of agentic transformation

To escape the trap of investment without return and design the new agentic organization, organizations need to focus on four structuring pillars:

Epistemological culture and hybrid collective intelligence

Replace the immediacy of “problem-solution-code” with the discipline of understanding before transforming. The production of shared knowledge between humans and digital intelligences must precede the distribution of AI throughout the company.

Integral organization design

Shift the focus from software engineering to systemic engineering. Through integral design, it is possible to model the organization by connecting four dimensions: environment, services, processes, and architecture.

Agentic FluencIA and role reconfiguration

Human work shifts from direct execution to understanding, creation, judgment, curation, and responsible decision-making. The developer, for example, reduces the time spent writing code to focus on problem architecture and result curation.

Capacity density with low complexity

Break the historical equation where increasing operational capacity required a proportional increase in structure, team, and system complexity. The agentic organization seeks a leaner structure, yet exponentially greater in execution capacity.

Leaders' new questioning

Agentifying the current digital organization will not produce ROI by itself. AI extraordinarily expands our execution capacity, but the choice of the future to be built remains a strictly human vector.

The central question for CTOs, CIOs, and CEOs in 2026 is no longer “What is our AI strategy?” but rather “What new Agentic Organization do we need to be, and what organizational capability will we redesign first?”

Want to delve deeper into these concepts and answer this new question? Read the e-book The Great AI Opportunity for Business, written by Romulo Cioffi, Chief AI and Innovation Officer at Squadra.