A practical, value-driven approach to AI agents in Managed Services

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption and maturity accelerate across industries, organizations strive to move beyond basic automation and drive deeper business transformation. As noted in a recent article about the future of work, AI is redefining what work means, what businesses can achieve and how they should evolve to compete and thrive.

To unlock AI’s potential, businesses should embrace more powerful, adaptable solutions to enhance insights, accelerate innovation and boost productivity. By advancing beyond simple robotic process automation (RPA), AI agents can combine greater autonomy and decision-making with review by humans for enhanced trust and governance.
 
We take a pragmatic, outcomes-based approach with our agentic outcomes enabled by PwC’s agent OS. We deploy agents designed to work alongside employees, automating repetitive tasks and augmenting knowledge (curating info from thousands of documents and sources and putting relevant details at employees’ fingertips) while emphasizing human review and governance. While these context-aware AI agents already offer advantages in PwC and client use cases, the real power comes from how PwC’s agent OS lets them work collaboratively across end-to-end workflows, not in isolation.

Transform your business trajectory with strategic AI

A strategic approach backed by deep industry experience can make your projects more productive. PwC can help you do things faster and more effectively, combining our managed services expertise with AI agents and the orchestration of those agents. Standalone agents are myopic. PwC’s agent OS can help seamlessly connect and scale intelligent agents into business-ready workflows up to 10x faster than traditional methods — so you can navigate AI integration challenges to drive growth while seamlessly enhancing existing business processes. So your people can focus less on the mundane and repetitive tasks and more on where they are most needed — strategy, innovation, oversight and high-value tasks. More than just adding AI to existing workflows, you can use AI agents to help write test scripts, create functional specifications, develop training materials. And so you can orchestrate and interconnect those workflows.

To transform the power of individual AI agents (including more than 250 agents we’ve developed over the past year across a wide range of functions at PwC — and many more for clients in industries from healthcare to hospitality), PwC introduced agent OS. It is an orchestration layer that brings together AI agents, people and systems, shifting AI agents from working in silos to acting collaboratively and in concert. PwC’s agent OS connects agents, people and systems so they can work in harmony — letting teams pull in the exact tools they need, when they need them. Agent OS and its canvas builder democratize agent development by enabling business users with domain knowledge to build agents themselves.

Key elements of agent OS include:

• Universal connectivity across platforms, tools and clouds.
• Built-in governance using our trusted frameworks.
• Collaborative intelligence where agents work together and get smarter over time.

PwC’s agent OS enables agents to share context, operate across leading platforms and tools you already use, and learn from one another. Each new agent makes the system more effective and essential. With agent OS, you can seamlessly connect and scale intelligent agents into business-ready workflows, up to 10x faster than traditional methods.

Across industries and platforms — from SAP to Salesforce to custom systems — agentic outcomes orchestrated through agent OS can unlock productivity gains by working together in integrated workflows, rather than acting in isolation. Key business processes and functions such as software development lifecycle, HR onboarding and retention, support desk ticket resolution, invoice processing and activities that rely heavily on documents can enjoy substantial productivity gains. PwC’s agent OS can amplify those gains, enabling AI agents to work together like a fleet rather than ships in the dark.

Despite AI’s transformative potential, organizations face significant challenges in deploying AI-driven solutions. Three critical challenges:

• Trust and compliance risks: Businesses hesitate to make AI decisions that lack transparency, especially in regulated industries that demand compliance and auditability.
• Data security and governance: AI models may access sensitive enterprise data, raising concerns about data privacy, ownership and protection.
• Talent and cost pressures: Companies struggle with hiring and retaining experienced professionals while managing the high costs of IT support, maintenance and knowledge transfer.

These orchestrated agents can directly address these challenges, offering a humans-at-the-helm AI solution that can enhance efficiency without compromising trust, security or compliance. PwC continues to develop more agents on agent OS and enhance our experience serving both our own firm and many other clients, offering built-in human review logic.

Traditional automation and robotic process automation (RPA) have improved efficiency, but they remain rules-based and inflexible. These agentic workflows represent the next evolution in Managed Services delivery — context-aware AI agents that learn from diverse data sources and provide intelligent real-time recommendations to the team on your project. Whether resolving an incident, onboarding a new employee or generating test scripts, teams can activate these tailored workflows from Outcomes Hub, adapt them and move faster with the support of both agents and humans.

The solution is enterprise-ready, designed to go beyond traditional automation by actively learning, reasoning and providing real-time insights while encouraging oversight by humans. Unlike static automation, these AI agents can assist teams in complex engagements, seamlessly integrating across leading platforms to enhance decision-making and efficiency.

Unlike conventional chatbots or static automation tools, our agentic outcomes enabled by agent OS:

• Act as specialists of the client’s system, drawing from deep knowledge of that system based on their training and experience with enterprise ecosystems like SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle and vast PwC experience.
• Learn continuously from structured and unstructured data, curating industry- and client-specific knowledge — as well as PwC’s deep industry experience consulting and implementing solutions.
• Assist employees in real-time, providing actionable insights and accelerating problem resolution.
• Enhance governance and security by maintaining audit trails and adhering to compliance frameworks and providing oversight. PwC’s approach focuses on transparently outlining the use and management of client data, emphasizing security and control.

Agents can act as senior architects, sitting virtually right next to the person who’s working with the client to resolve issues, conversing in natural language. And these virtual architects are not generic, but highly skilled, experienced and knowledgeable about:

• The specific technology the client is using.
• The specific client engagement solution design.
• The specific industry or ecosystem and its unique issues and considerations.

These managed services agents serve as advisors, assisting the team with real-time insights while humans review their input for relevance, quality, value and appropriateness. They continuously learn, combining client-specific knowledge with PwC’s deep industry and technology-specific experience. They also draw from PwC’s internal use of AI agents and can be tailored by industry as well as client.

Agentic workflows act not as a replacement for human expertise but as enablers that position humans at the helm and empower organizations to resolve issues faster, reduce costs and enhance operational resilience. By leveraging generative AI (GenAI) and knowledge management capabilities, agentic outcomes augment human expertise — and already deliver measurable business results:

• 50-70% faster issue resolution by reducing manual investigation time.
• 90% increase in first-time resolution accuracy, reducing rework and escalations.
• 40% reduction in support costs by optimizing resource allocation and reducing dependency on full-time employees (FTEs).
• Enhanced compliance and security controls through AI-driven governance mechanisms.
• Enhanced human talent who grow their skills, knowledge and value as they collaborate with these agents.
• Greater opportunity for innovation by support staff who have fewer time-consuming tasks and enjoy more effective operations — and have more time to think strategically and creatively about business processes and outcomes.

These improvements also lead to increased customer satisfaction, which can retain and grow your business. And that value can grow also through the continuous learning these AI agents acquire from their interactions and the knowledge base. Agentic outcomes also can serve development processes, helping to generate and execute code and create specifications, for example.

To effectively navigate the adoption of AI agents, prioritize repetitive, rule-based and knowledge-driven tasks that benefit most from AI acceleration. You can improve future outcomes for your business by identifying and pursuing high-impact workflows for AI augmentation.

AI adoption faces trust, compliance and cost issues. PwC enables humans to conduct oversight and provides checkpoints, data security and governance, mitigating risks that come with AI.

PwC is helping deliver practical, enterprise-grade AI today, not theoretical solutions. Agentic outcomes can help address the talent and knowledge gap between implementation and support teams. Our trusted AI approach balances automation, governance and real-world application. And PwC also recognizes that today in the age of AI, speed matters more, scale matters less, innovation matters most.

PwC is already helping enterprises scale AI responsibly, balancing automation with governance to drive long-term value.

Ready to accelerate your technology transformation with AI? Connect with PwC’s Technology Managed Services team today and see how agent OS powers connected, context-aware agents across SAP and enterprise platforms.