Agentic AI has the potential to revolutionize workplace processes in nearly every sector by improving business decision-making, workflow efficiency and customer interactions and experiences.
While interest in agentic AI is widespread, the motivation to use it differs by industry. Cloudera surveyed 1,484 enterprise IT leaders across 14 countries to better understand their approach to agentic AI in 2025, including how specific industries plan to implement the technology. It found that highly regulated fields, such as finance and healthcare, look to agentic AI to strengthen their cybersecurity posture and protect sensitive data, whether transactional information or patient records.
Almost two-thirds of respondents (63%) intend to use agentic AI for security monitoring. Other industries, such as retail and telecommunications, look to AI agents to improve customer experience, with half of organizations implementing agents for customer support purposes.
Let’s dive into current perceptions of agentic AI and implementation plans by sector.
Improving Security and Client Relations in Finance and Insurance
Financial and insurance companies primarily value agentic AI technologies for their ability to help with security monitoring and for customer experience. Respondents said their top use cases for agentic AI include fraud detection (56%), risk assessment (44%), and investment advisory (38%).
AI agents can identify patterns and anomalies in data sets to avoid data breaches and identify vulnerabilities through security monitoring. This is highly beneficial for protecting sensitive data in regulated industries.
AI agents can also improve advisory services and other client-facing tasks. Seventy-eight percent of industry decision-makers intend to use AI agents for customer support. Agents quickly pull data from multiple sources to generate complex responses on behalf of client requests. So, an AI agent can analyze large volumes of data to generate a response if a client asks for potential investment opportunities with low risk and high returns.
While the thought of agentic AI systems working autonomously with sensitive data understandably raises concerns, security guardrails keep these systems in check. Authorization and permissions are critical components of AI implementation, as AI systems can only access the data they are permitted to work with.
Agentic AI also presents a customer experience continuity challenge. While the technology works efficiently with multiple data sets and can quickly process client information, it does not offer the personal touch of client-facing personnel.
Streamlining Healthcare Workflows
Healthcare workers see several applications for agentic AI, including streamlining administrative tasks and providing decision-making recommendations for better patient care outcomes. According to the survey, healthcare providers view the top use cases of the technology as appointment scheduling (51%), diagnostic assistance (50%), and medical records processing (47%).
AI agents can relieve medical professionals of repetitive tasks by processing insurance information and scheduling appointments. They can also streamline daily workflows to make patient visits more efficient by quickly processing a patient’s medical history and delivering a summary to a healthcare professional. These systems can take this action further by providing diagnoses and evidence-based treatment recommendations.
One scenario might be an AI diagnostic assistance agent trained on thousands of pneumonia or lung cancer X-ray images. Leveraging pattern recognition, it could find early signs not immediately visible to the human eye, highlighting where a radiologist should examine more closely. This would help physicians make more accurate diagnoses.
Improve Manufacturing Efficiency and Safety
Nearly half of manufacturing organizations are exploring AI agents for process automation (49%), supply chain optimization (48%), and quality control (47%). Specifically, they hope to use AI agents to intelligently monitor production lines for defects or reroute supply chain logistics when disruptions occur, dramatically boosting efficiency.
AI agents can also efficiently monitor operations from a safety perspective. Health and safety teams typically inspect manufacturing plants by sending contractors on-site to assess risk. However, these processes are time-consuming and error-prone, as incidents still occur despite protocols.
Agentic AI is a transformative opportunity in this field. It enables organizations to analyze historical data, detect patterns, and identify potential hazards before they materialize. This helps employees deliver more accurate automated risk assessment reports, resulting in safer environments.
Helping Retail, E-Commerce, and Telecommunications with Client Relations
The retail, e-commerce, and telecommunications sectors primarily plan to use AI agents for customer-facing initiatives. Half of organizations in these industries are considering AI agents for customer support purposes (50%), price optimization (49%), and demand forecasting (48%).
Agentic AI systems can analyze customer browsing history, preferences, and purchases to tailor personalized product recommendations to increase the likelihood of repeated purchases. Based on personal customer data, they can curate special offers, emails, and ads to nurture customers along the sales funnel, allowing human employees to focus on more strategic tasks.
Telecommunications organizations see value in using agents to comb through historical data, such as usage patterns, billing history, and customer support interactions, to predict which customers are at risk of churn and why. In the case of a telecommunications business, an agent can flag customers who reduced their monthly usage or had multiple interactions with customer support.
The Future of Agentic AI
Agentic AI has the potential to transform the way work gets done, regardless of industry. Regulated industries can significantly benefit from security monitoring to prevent breaches, while customer-facing organizations can improve client experiences.
Whether a financial firm is looking to improve security, a healthcare provider hopes to improve efficiency, or a retailer aims to improve customer experience, implementing these systems for industry-specific purposes can take enterprises to new heights. To get a leg up on the competition, enterprises seek to leverage this technology as soon as this year before expanding and scaling their capabilities.
Learn more about how enterprises plan to leverage agentic AI by reading the full report.
