For those who’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 every little thing. The issue, as many enterprise leaders have come to grasp, is that it’s been remarkably arduous to show any of that on a steadiness sheet.
John Bailey thinks 2026 is the yr that modifications, and he has a transparent thought of what’s driving the shift.
“I feel 2026 is the yr of the brokers,” mentioned Bailey, talking to UC At this time at ISE 2026 in Barcelona.
“Agentic AI is the excitement for this yr, and actually it’s producing the type of outcomes that prospects need.”
Why Enterprise AI Has an ROI Drawback
Bailey is aware of the frustration effectively. 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 carefully with enterprise prospects navigating the hole between AI’s promise and its worth. For some time, he says, that hole has been vital.
“Information base and LLM AI — issues that usually assist productiveness — are nice within the office, but it surely’s arduous 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 quicker, however translating that into board-level ROI has confirmed elusive. The productiveness beneficial properties are actual however diffuse — unfold throughout lots of of staff in ways in which resist clear measurement.
How Agentic AI Adjustments the Equation
Agentic AI, Bailey argues, is structurally completely different. Reasonably than augmenting a human’s workflow within the background, brokers may 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 will watch them work and full the duty, after which repeat that process time and again,” he says.
“Now there’s one thing we will really dangle on to by way of worth, and we will show this stuff 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 need to put up with — these are the issues we’d like brokers to deal with for us, so we will actually concentrate on 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 substitute workforce, however as an amplifier: releasing human groups to spend extra time on the work that really requires them.
What This Means for the Digital Office
That framing additionally informs AVI-SPL’s broader strategic course. The corporate is pushing a brand new portfolio idea at ISE this yr known as DWX, Digital Office Expertise, which reframes its know-how providing round enterprise outcomes fairly than product classes. Bailey explains:
“Why are we doing this? What are we making an attempt to attain with know-how? As a result of there are a number 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 trade’s largest integrators begins main with outcome-first questions fairly than know-how classes, it displays a maturation in how enterprise prospects are shopping for, and what they count on to have the ability to present for it.
The AI hype cycle has been lengthy, and persistence in some quarters is sporting skinny. But when Bailey is true, the instruments to lastly justify the funding are arriving — and their affect can be felt effectively past the productiveness dashboard. He says:
“Agentic AI will change not solely the best way we get work completed, 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 will we speed up, how will we amplify the issues that we’re engaged on.”
