April 2021 - Page 50 of 66

Almost every organisation has bought business AI and almost none has changed how the work is actually done, which is why the numbers on the board slide still describe usage rather than outcome. This guide sets out the four stages a business AI programme passes through — assistance, workflow redesign, agents, and orchestration — what has to change at each one, and why the constraint is the operating model rather than the model. It covers use case selection, the data and permission foundations that agents expose, agent identity and control planes, security threats specific to agentic deployments, the regulatory position after the EU’s Digital Omnibus delay, what business AI actually costs once consumption and oversight are included, and the metrics that survive a finance review.