5 Questions to Ask About Agentic AI in Your Business

AI has shifted from tools that respond to tools that take action. It’s known as agentic AI, and while it comes with new opportunities there are also new risks to consider. Pressing pause and asking the right questions now is key to ensure you can avoid costly mistakes or security issues down the track. But what do you need to know exactly? We’ve put together five essential questions so NT businesses can skip the guesswork, get the right information, and move forward with confidence.

1. What Do We Actually Want to Do?

This helps you begin with purpose, so you’re thinking strategically and can get the most out of your AI tools. First, you should consider whether you want productivity support (generative AI) or autonomous action (agentic AI). The difference?

• Productivity support: AI is used to speed up processes, but you’re still making decisions at each stage. For example, this might look like using generative AI to draft emails or reports, to summarise meetings, or to create marketing collateral. You provide a prompt, and the AI tool fulfils this prompt without taking further action.
• Autonomous action: AI can make decisions and complete tasks with multiple steps within set rules. This means human input isn’t required at each step and AI goes from a tool to an assistant. This might look like booking in a meeting after checking your calendar or answering common enquiries and helping your customer support team in real-time. Common low risk use cases you could start with include task coordination, monitoring and alerts, and data analysis and reporting.

To decide which is right for your business, you need to identify:

• Which tasks are repetitive, time-consuming, and prone to errors?
• Where would decision support be useful versus decision making?

2. What Data Does AI Need Access To?

Agentic AI might need access to systems, files, emails, and workflows to get work done. This introduces new risks, like oversharing permissions and poor identity and access management. When this happens, AI tools have the potential to access and expose confidential or sensitive information. If you’re planning to adopt agentic AI, it’s essential to understand the data it needs to access, and to make sure it can only access what it needs to do the job (this is known as the principle of least privilege). You should also have clear boundaries and controls in place.

3. Are Our Security Foundations Strong Enough?

When your security foundations aren’t secure, AI can accelerate the wrong outcomes. A strong cyber security approach should cover multi-factor authentication (MFA), regular data backups and software updates, monitoring, and policies and user training.

If you need to build you cyber security posture before introducing agentic AI, the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s Essential Eight provides a recognised Australian benchmark. If you want to get started, our audit service includes reviewing your environment to identify security risks, and working with you to put the right measures in place. Head here to learn more.

4. Who is Accountable When AI Takes Action?

While agentic AI can make decisions, it shouldn’t operate in an unchecked capacity. There’s still the need for:

• Human oversight – this ensures errors can be identified and fixed (including hallucinations and bias), and you can support accountability.
• Defined limits – there are guardrails and boundaries in place that clearly define what agentic AI is allowed to do.
• Clear escalation paths – there are set rules that indicate when AI should ask for help, and who it should ask. For example, your agentic AI might automatically assist with customer enquiries, but when it identifies a customer complaint, it should check in with your customer support team. This means AI stays efficient while you maintain oversight and control of complex situations.  

From a governance perspective, you also need to decide who’s responsible for reviewing decisions, and who intervenes when something goes wrong.

5. Do We Have the Right IT Partner to Guide This?

Adopting agentic AI shouldn’t be a DIY project. Spanning areas like security, infrastructure, compliance, and change management, you need to work with an expert who makes sure every base is covered from a smooth process to secure implementation and management. In regional and remote areas, working with a local, trusted IT guide is also essential because they understand typical challenges and how to overcome them. If an agentic AI pathway that’s strategically led, security first, and locally accountable sounds good, our team can help.

How One IT Can Support Your Agentic AI Journey

Agentic AI can have powerful benefits, but it’s not a plug and play solution. By asking these questions, you can support measured, secure, and well-governed AI adoption – and avoid running into risks later. At One IT Services we can:

• Help to identify how AI can be used in your business
• Support good governance
• Assist with implementation
• Ensure data and systems stay secure

We help businesses across the NT, including in Darwin, Palmerston, Alice Springs, and Katherine get the most out of agentic AI. If you want to get the ball rolling, book a digital strategy conversation with our experts today.