Imagine 2026: Moving from AI Hype to the Autonomous Enterprise

None of us can go anywhere without hearing about AI. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. In the early stages of any technology revolution, there’s an explosion of ideas — but also a lot of noise.

Despite all of the excitement around AI agents, automation, and autonomy, there is a deeper challenge: solving the AI paradox. Many of us use AI in our daily work and can see how fast and intelligent it is. But if AI is so smart, why haven’t we managed to transform many more enterprise processes and deliver more meaningful ROI? What is missing?

First, we need context. In enterprises, AI isn’t about understanding raw intelligence; it’s about fostering contextual intelligence that is based on your data and business realities. A nuclear physicist does not know how to process an insurance claim. In business, if you string mistakes together in multi-step processes, things can break completely.

Second, enterprises often have widespread sprawl and silos that are further exacerbated by AI. Using AI in silos relegates it to merely completing tasks — and those tasks don’t always translate to tangible business outcomes of driving revenue, reducing cost, or managing risk. To drive business-critical processes, you need orchestration across people, teams, systems, and agents.

Third, a lack of governance and observability are key blockers to scaling AI beyond pilots. We need these to make everything work better and more securely.

So how do we solve this AI paradox? What should be your enterprise AI strategy?

Most enterprises are already deploying co-pilots. We all jumped into using them because we wanted to get value quickly. They work well for emails and documents. But they don’t solve the paradox around enterprise productivity. In addition, many system-of-record (SOR) companies are selling AI agents within their own offerings. SORs are proficient in their domain with security and governance, so they understand the appeal. However, the reality is that SORs are not going to cannibalize revenue from their legacy business models. Their incentive is the same old SaaS story: Let’s preserve a seat-based licensing model and upcharge for consumption of the new technology. We often hear from SaaS vendors around how their revenues will increase significantly because of AI, but how can this be when up to 80% of their workloads can be fully automated?

There are also plenty of point solutions and AI-native startups to choose from. But they lack enterprise-grade technology to solve the paradox. A collection of copilots, agents and point solutions is not a strategy.

If none of the above will harness AI to its full potential, what’s missing?

The Autonomous Enterprise vision

We believe the Autonomous Enterprise should be the enterprise AI strategy of the future.

What is an Autonomous Enterprise?

• It’s an AI-first organization where up to 80% of work runs autonomously or AI-assisted.
• Agentic automation orchestrates across applications and reduces the need for more software licenses.
• Importantly, the Autonomous Enterprise doesn’t mean fewer people. Instead, every employee can be meaningfully more productive. Not 10–20% more productive, but 3x more productive.

Since Automation Anywhere announced the Autonomous Enterprise two years ago, competitors have introduced their own versions, such as the ‘Agentic Enterprise’ or ‘Agentic Business.’ Some even use the same Autonomous Enterprise name we pioneered. But make no mistake: What others offer is not the same as Automation Anywhere’s vision.

Automation Anywhere has been building the Autonomous Enterprise model for more than 20 years. Our customers are already working toward automating up to 80% of processes across systems and data, with collaboration between agents and human workers, and with higher levels of accuracy, accountability, and ROI.

This is where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Building the foundation for the Autonomous Enterprise

Two years ago, Automation Anywhere launched the Agentic Process Automation (APA) platform to help organizations overwhelmed by AI noise and eager to deliver on the promise of AI. That was followed by our industry-first Process Reasoning Engine (PRE) that is the AI brain powering automations trained on more than 420 million enterprise data points. And, we met the needs of business users with our enterprise-grade Agentic Solutions — the latest developed in collaboration with OpenAI — that offer purpose-built, governed AI agents to execute high-impact business processes.

This year at Imagine 2026, we shared some big announcements to further accelerate the delivery of the Autonomous Enterprise.

The first is our refreshed APA platform. Our Mozart orchestrator is best-in-class at orchestrating agents, people and automations across every application and platform. The latest release solves the challenges of the most complex process to do the big work that spans systems, with our Process Reasoning Engine solving the accuracy challenge with contextual intelligence that delivers nearly 100% accuracy. Our Responsible AI Fabric provides governance and observability across all your AI agents, from any and all vendors.

The second announcement is our enhanced autonomous ITSM solution. It offers a library of pre-built agents to resolve more complex types of tickets and connectivity to thousands more applications to offer a seamless user experience. We are committed to helping all IT leaders transform the economics of ITSM for the AI age, cutting their SaaS spend and delivering more autonomous outcomes.

The third announcement is our new and revamped Agentic Solutions. We’ve enhanced our seven existing Agentic Solutions with more autonomy and added two new solutions to the portfolio: Autonomous IT and Autonomous Finance. These new solutions were designed in partnership with CIOs and CFOs to automate an entire department. For example, our Autonomous IT Solution is built on our APA platform, already deployed inside our own company as Customer 0, and co-created with some forward-leaning customers to deliver outcomes for the most critical end-to-end IT processes.

The fourth announcement is Automation Anywhere Code. Vibe coding tools are great, but the challenge has been around delivering production-grade applications with context, security and governance. Automation Anywhere Code lets developers build, test and deploy enterprise-grade applications, UI, processes, agents, context, security and more, in as little as one week.

And our last announcement is a special one: EnterpriseClaw. Many of us have heard about OpenClaw agents. They can think, decide, and execute autonomously. The potential is real. But so is the problem. What makes OpenClaw-like agents powerful for personal productivity is what makes them dangerous in the enterprise. Within an enterprise, the most critical data lives in a secure environment that was never designed to let agents run free.

That’s why we developed EnterpriseClaw. EnterpriseClaw brings together our enterprise-grade technology with the power of OpenClaw-like agents. You will see other vendors trying to replicate this, but Automation Anywhere’s EnterpriseClaw is different because we orchestrate and govern the entire process and workflow, not just individual agentic tasks. We also do it with the accuracy required for business-critical processes.

Thankfully, we didn't build EnterpriseClaw alone, but with some of the world's best technology partners who know what enterprise-grade truly means: Cisco, NVIDIA, Okta and OpenAI.

Cisco handles security monitoring and threat detection for agent activity. NVIDIA provides the compute infrastructure and secure execution for on-prem and edge. Okta manages identity and access controls for agent interactions with systems. OpenAI brings the top model intelligence.

The winners won’t wait

The Autonomous Enterprise is not a distant future vision — it is already taking shape. The organizations that will lead in the AI era won’t be the ones experimenting at the edges or waiting for the technology to fully mature; they will be the ones thinking bigger, acting earlier, and committing to enterprise-wide transformation.

The opportunity is not to optimize the old way of working with a few new tools, but to fundamentally reimagine how work gets done. If you didn’t attend Imagine 2026, watch the keynote presentation and explore deep-dive discussions featuring customers and partners who are already moving toward this bold vision, such as Citi, NHS, Accenture, Cisco, VF Corporation, Aramark, KeyBank, Thrivent Financial, Petrobras, and many more.

The time to get started is now. Leaders must be bold enough to move beyond pilots, ambitious enough to rethink the enterprise operating model, and early enough to help define what the Autonomous Enterprise becomes.