Genpact survey of more than 2,000 executives finds the barrier to AI value is operational, not just technological, and AI Leaders are tackling it with Agentic Operations
NEW YORK, Nov. 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Genpact (NYSE: G), the Agentic Operations company, today released a research report, Autonomy in Practice: How agentic operations can turn AI progress into business value, based on a survey of more than 2,000 enterprise executives across 17 industries. It finds that AI agents have reached production faster than enterprises have redesigned how they operate, and most are not yet capturing the autonomy dividend: the value that comes when AI-enabled gains translate into better business performance, not simply greater productivity.
Key findings from Genpact's Autonomy in Practice report:
- 79% of enterprises surveyed have AI agents in production, but just 20% use them broadly and consistently across functions.
- Only 15% have fully tied AI investment to P&L outcomes.
- On average, just 49% of AI initiatives funded in the past 24 months have delivered the value expected.
- Only 9% have completed significant operating model transformation.
- AI now leads or fully runs 40% of decisions, more than double a year ago, yet humans still decide or audit in at least 87% of cases at every decision stage.
- Agents are scaling alongside people: 92% of respondents with agents in production kept their human workforce the same size or grew it.
The findings show that autonomy in practice is not full autonomy. It is deciding deliberately where agents act, where people decide and validate, and what business outcomes the hybrid workforce produces.
AI Leaders, the 17% of enterprises at the top of Genpact's AI Maturity Index, are further along in building Agentic Operations: the operating model that runs people and agents as one workforce. Genpact's research measured five building blocks critical to this model, but most enterprises have not yet connected them.
What AI Leaders do differently
Backed by a CEO-level mandate, AI Leaders are ahead on all five building blocks. They:
- Reinvent work across the enterprise, not function by function.
- Build the human-agent workforce deliberately, creating new roles such as exception specialists and agent trainers.
- Strengthen the data and AI foundation for repeatable scale, giving agents access to act across systems, not just retrieve information.
- Govern and secure agents throughout their lifecycle, not just at deployment.
- Make value capture a P&L discipline, tying AI-enabled gains to named owners and P&L lines.
"Enterprises have become effective at deploying AI agents. Running them is the hard part," said Sanjeev Vohra, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Genpact. "Agentic Operations connects AI with context-rich process intelligence, human judgment, and governance to capture the autonomy dividend."
About the survey
The study, conducted in 2026, surveyed senior executives at companies with annual revenues from $1 billion to more than $50 billion across 17 industries and 14 business functions, supplemented by in-depth interviews with enterprise leaders. Findings are self-reported; percentages are rounded.
Download the full report at https://www.genpact.com/insight/autonomy-in-practice.
About Genpact
Genpact (NYSE: G) is the Agentic Operations company, where frontier AI meets context-rich process intelligence. For decades, we have run mission-critical operations for the world's leading enterprises across finance, risk, supply chain, banking, insurance, and procurement. Today, with Agentic Operations, agents run the work, and our experts own the outcomes, so clients grow faster, operate leaner, and convert more to cash. Get to know us at genpact.com and on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.
MEDIA CONTACT:
Keith Gordon
Genpact Media Relations
917-204-9952
keith.gordon@genpact.com
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SOURCE Genpact
