Agentic AI is the hottest new trend in today’s tech sector, as both large companies and buzzy startups promise that a legion of autonomous programs will soon be able to manage our personal and professional lives. 

Sapna Chadha, vice president for Southeast Asia and South Asia frontier at Google Asia Pacific, described agentic AI as the logical next step in this new technology. “AI agents are where you take intelligent language models and give them access to tools,” she said Tuesday at the Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore conference. This access allows the language models to stitch together complex and multi-step actions. 

Vivek Luthra, Accenture’s Asia-Pacific data and AI lead, shared one example from Accenture’s own experience: Marketing teams could use an AI agent to manage campaigns, allowing human employees to engage in more value-added functions. (Accenture is a founding partner of Brainstorm AI Singapore)

Chadha predicted that almost a third of all enterprise software will have agentic AI built in by 2028, and could automate almost 15% of day-to-day work and workflows. 

But Luthra suggested that most companies aren’t there yet. Accenture clients fall into three stages of agentic AI adoption. The first is AI assistance, where staff members ask an agentic co-pilot for help in much the same way they might ask a fellow team member a question. The second stage is treating it as an advisor, increasing the overall capability of all human employees and empowering them to make the right decisions. The final stage is giving autonomous agents the authority to handle entire processes on their own.

As of now, Luthra says, most clients are in the first and second stage, with fewer companies prepared to let AI agents truly handle things on their own.

According to Luthra, companies leading the way on AI begin by imagining new ways of structuring workflows, then assess what skills are needed in the workplace to make that happen. Then, they put agentic AI into practice with a cross-platform “workbench” that gives employees opportunities to integrate AI agents into their daily lives. 

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Robotaxis are starting to become a reality after years of hype and promises. Self-driving cars are now on the road in cities like San Francisco, Shenzhen and Wuhan, and robotaxi firms are foraying into new markets like Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. And on Thursday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggested that half the U.S. population will get access to a robotaxi by 2026. 

At this point, those working in the autonomous vehicle space think the problem isn’t technology, but rather people, and regulators in particular.

“It’s clearly mature enough to scale, but we have to work with the government on the regulation part,” said Kerry Xu, WeRide’s general manager for Singapore, at the Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore conference on Wednesday. “Public acceptance, data, transparency…I think it takes time for the community to completely accept AVs as part of their normal life.”

Earlier this year, WeRide hosted Singapore Acting Transport Minister Jeffrey Siow at its Guangzhou headquarters, where the minister announced ambitious plans to debut AVs in the city’s public housing estates by the end of the year. The Chinese startup also debuted Singapore’s first fully driverless bus system earlier in July. 

ST Liew, president of Qualcomm’s Taiwan and Southeast Asia business, agreed that the private sector needed to help build an ecosystem of trust. “We always advocate that we should have cross-industry benchmark transparency in the training data and make sure that we are compliant,” he said.

“Take care of the safety, make sure that it is transparent, and then you can enjoy yourself while you’re in the car,” he continued.

Liew credited Qualcomm’s work on autonomous vehicles to the company’s four decades of experience working on semiconductors. He noted that the power of new chips allow for “AI at the edge” to make the process of learning, deduction, and decision-making more automated. This enables driverless cars to be deployed across different geographies and weather patterns, such as Southeast Asia.

Cars built in Asia, and particularly China, are now becoming more sophisticated, offering a wide array of customer-friendly assisted driving and software features, turning cars into smartphones on wheels.

Liew pointed out that the car industry is now shifting to the “software-defined car,” which allows drivers to do much more inside the vehicle.

“If I can go into the car, then I can conduct my meetings, I can use AI to ask where I am, book my restaurants, and all that,” Liew said, “just like it’s an extension of my office or my home.” 

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The private sector has been in the driver’s seat on AI development since ChatGPT’s release in late 2023. Big Tech companies like Microsoft, Google and Alibaba and smaller startups like Anthropic and Mistral are all trying to monetize this new technology for future growth.

Yet at the Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore conference on Wednesday, two experts called for a more humane and interdisciplinary approach to artificial intelligence.

AI needs to “think better,” not just faster and cheaper, said Anthea Roberts, founder of startup Dragonfly Thinking. Both human individuals and AI models can struggle to look beyond a particular perspective, whether based on a country or discipline in the case of people, or a “centrist approach” in the case of computers. Human-AI collaboration can enable policy makers to think through issues from different country, disciplinary, and domain perspectives, increasing the likelihood of success, she explains. 

Artificial intelligence is a “civilization-changing technology,” that requires a multi-stakeholder ecosystem of academia, civil society, government, and industry working to improve it, Russell Wald, executive director at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, said. 

“Industry really needs to be a leader in this space, but academia does too,” he said, pointing to its early support for frontier technology, its ability to train future “AI leaders,” and its willingness to publish information. 

Stopping AI from being a ‘crazy uncle’

Despite rapid growth in AI use, several people are still skeptical about using AI, pointing to its penchant to hallucinate or go off the rails with strange or even offensive language.

Roberts suggested that most people fall into two camps. The first camp, which includes most industry players and even university students, engage in “uncritical use” of AI. The other instead follow “critical non-use”: Those concerned about bias, transparency and inauthenticity simply refuse to join the AI bandwagon.

“I would invite people who aren’t Silicon Valley ‘tech bros’ to get involved in the making and shaping of how we use these products,” she said. 

Wald said his institute has learned a lot about humanity in the process of training AI. “You want the right parts of humanity…not the crazy uncle at the Thanksgiving table,” he said. 

Both experts said that getting AI right is critical, due to the momentous possible benefits this new technology could bring to society.

“You need to think [about] not just what people want—which is often their baser instincts—but what do they want to want, which is their more altruistic instincts,” Roberts explained. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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