NLX, the AI platform powering advanced conversational experiences for the world's most admired brands, today announced the results of a commissioned survey of U.S. executives in companies with 5,000 or more employees. The survey, which focused on agentic AI, was conducted by QuestionPro, an independent online research, insights, and experience company.

Enterprise executives are grappling with how to leverage agentic AI in their organizations, especially amid recent market and media hype. NLX wanted to know more about executive comfort level with agentic AI acting on behalf of customers, including types of tasks and the form of agentic AI that could have the most impact on the customer experience.

 General comfort level with agentic AI

Nearly half of executives (47%) said they are comfortable having agentic AI make decisions and complete tasks for their customers, full stop. A smaller number (40%) said it depended on the task. Just 11% said they were not comfortable.

Comfort level around specific tasks

"The fact that a non-trivial amount of executives at enterprise organizations are fine having agentic AI prescribe medicine or control air traffic shows a lack of understanding of the current capabilities of the technology," said Andrei Papancea, NLX co-founder and CEO. "With today's AI error rates, even the most conservative estimates would translate to several catastrophic events and deaths per day with those two use cases alone."

Travel planning, grading papers, and applying for jobs were the tasks chosen most often by executives as something they would be comfortable having AI agents do. Still, 22% would be comfortable having AI prescribe medication, and 14% would be comfortable with AI handling air traffic control.

Being focused on the practical application of AI technology, NLX stresses that all AI, including agentic AI, is rooted in statistics, which means that some of its conclusions and decisions will be wrong. This is why it cannot be turned loose on structured business processes where even the smallest error rate has unacceptable consequences, despite what news headlines and pundits might suggest.

Highest potential to improve customer experience and satisfaction

Robotic process automation (RBA) and conversational experiences were nearly tied for the form of AI with the most potential to improve customer experiences and satisfaction, 37% and 35%, respectively. Autonomous backend systems were close behind, with 28% of executive respondents thinking it had the highest potential.