If you happen to’ve spent any time on a convention ground within the final two years, you’ll have heard the identical dialog on loop. AI is remodeling the office, boosting productiveness, altering all the pieces. The issue, as many enterprise leaders have come to understand, is that it’s been remarkably laborious to show any of that on a steadiness sheet.
John Bailey thinks 2026 is the 12 months that modifications, and he has a transparent thought of what’s driving the shift.
“I feel 2026 is the 12 months of the brokers,” stated Bailey, chatting with UC At the moment at ISE 2026 in Barcelona.
“Agentic AI is the excitement for this 12 months, and actually it’s producing the sort of outcomes that prospects need.”
Why Enterprise AI Has an ROI Downside
Bailey is aware of the frustration properly. As Senior Vice President of Know-how and Innovation at AVI-SPL, one of many world’s largest audio-visual and unified communications integrators, he works intently with enterprise prospects navigating the hole between AI’s promise and its worth. For some time, he says, that hole has been important.
“Data base and LLM AI — issues that usually assist productiveness — are nice within the office, however it’s laborious to measure return on funding as a enterprise. Am I really getting again the effectivity, the output, the objectives from the investments I’m making?”
It’s a query that has undermined confidence in enterprise AI adoption. Companies have invested in instruments that make people marginally sooner, however translating that into board-level ROI has confirmed elusive. The productiveness positive factors are actual however diffuse — unfold throughout a whole bunch of staff in ways in which resist clear measurement.
How Agentic AI Adjustments the Equation
Agentic AI, Bailey argues, is structurally completely different. Moderately than augmenting a human’s workflow within the background, brokers will be given discrete, outlined duties, after which watched.
“With brokers, we can provide them a function. We can provide them a workload, assign them a process, and we are able to watch them work and full the duty, after which repeat that process again and again,” he says.
“Now there’s one thing we are able to really cling on to by way of worth, and we are able to show these items out.”
Automation as Amplifier, Not Substitute
Bailey is cautious to outline what agentic AI is for, and what it isn’t. There’s a model of this dialog that veers into anxiousness about automation changing human judgment, creativity, or collaboration. That’s not the story he’s telling.
“We’re not making an attempt to dump creativity. We’re not making an attempt to dump collaboration,” he says. “It’s simply the mundane work that all of us should put up with — these are the issues we’d like brokers to deal with for us, so we are able to actually give attention to participating with one another, with our colleagues, and creating extra options for our prospects.”
It’s a distinction that issues for a way organisations talk AI adoption internally. The productiveness case for agentic AI is strongest exactly when it’s positioned not as a alternative workforce, however as an amplifier: liberating human groups to spend extra time on the work that truly requires them.
What This Means for the Digital Office
That framing additionally informs AVI-SPL’s broader strategic route. The corporate is pushing a brand new portfolio idea at ISE this 12 months known as DWX, Digital Office Expertise, which reframes its expertise providing round enterprise outcomes somewhat than product classes. Bailey explains:
“Why are we doing this? What are we making an attempt to attain with expertise? As a result of there are a whole lot of issues in our toolkit that won’t even be conventional AV-type applied sciences.”
It’s a telling sign from an organization of AVI-SPL’s scale. When one of many business’s largest integrators begins main with outcome-first questions somewhat than expertise classes, it displays a maturation in how enterprise prospects are shopping for, and what they anticipate to have the ability to present for it.
The AI hype cycle has been lengthy, and persistence in some quarters is carrying skinny. But when Bailey is true, the instruments to lastly justify the funding are arriving — and their influence will probably be felt properly past the productiveness dashboard. He says:
“Agentic AI will change not solely the best way we get work performed, however the best way we organise our work and the best way our staff work together with AI and are available collectively to type groups. It’s not about offloading, it’s about how can we speed up, how can we amplify the issues that we’re engaged on.”
