
Episode #4
#110 - Every Agent Succeeds And The Company Still Fails, with Forrester's Faram Medhora
Episode four of our GAEA Talks Forrester Season, recorded in Austin, Texas.Graeme Scott sits down with Faram Medhora, Principal Analyst at Forrester, who covers enterprise business applications, ERP modernisation, SaaS governance and the mission critical functions around finance and operations. He describes his job simply: making sure technology leaders do not make multimillion dollar mistakes, and these days billion dollar ones.Faram has spent nearly two decades leading business technology initiatives, including eight years with Forrester Consulting before moving into research. He is unusually well placed to say what AI is genuinely doing inside large organisations, because he is in the room when the bill arrives.His diagnosis of the last two years is direct. The number one mistake technology leaders made was investing in the technology first and working out what to do with it afterwards. Everything is now labelled AI, which makes it hard to tell what any given capability actually is until it meets the rest of the ecosystem and the problems surface. Risk gets treated as a governance conversation for later. As he puts it, organisations understand the risks, but they do not understand the implications of the risks.The argument at the centre of the episode is one every board should hear. Even if every individual agent in an enterprise is successful, the company can still be failing. He gives a worked example. A sales agent is told to drive sales, so it discounts. An operations agent is told to close deals, so it adds services to handle fulfilment. Both hit their objectives. Margin collapses. Nobody defined the company's actual goal between them.Then there is the off switch, which is the part that should genuinely concern people. Imagine seventy percent of a company's work has moved to agents, and something goes wrong that means you can no longer trust them. You cannot simply switch them off, because the human capacity to absorb that work is gone. The operating model has already shifted.He is also precise about where value actually is. Most of what enterprises are getting today is efficiency, which is cost avoidance, and cost avoidance does not go back on the books. The move from efficiency to effectiveness is where the real argument sits, and most organisations are stuck in proof of concept because they can see the risk of scaling.

