The best way to improve an old process is to get rid of it: Stand up a new process that does many old ones at once — or takes a different, faster path to value. Some companies are achieving this transformative value. But most aren’t. In our experience, four obstacles are holding them back:
- Workflows are linear and rules-based — built for people assisted by simple automation, not for people governing intelligent, autonomous AI agents
- AI doesn’t have governance built in, so your stakeholders won’t trust or use it
- “Pilot theater”: Pilots work in the lab but don’t scale enough for real-world value
- Controls and audit take place after AI has done its work, adding costs and delays
Agentic scaffolding can help overcome these obstacles. It combines tools, people, and processes so you can safely design, simulate, visualize, stress-test, and stand up new agent-driven processes. It embeds decision rights and governance. And it helps you keep enhancing what you’ve launched.
One Fortune 500 insurer that we work with, for example, is using agentic scaffolding to expand beyond its core business and grow in a different market: smaller companies, which typically provide coverage to 100 or fewer employees, spouses, and dependents. Scaffolding has helped create — and validate — agentic workflows for intake, quoting, underwriting, enrollment, and billing in the market. That’s cut the quote-to-bill time by 50% to 80%, depending on case complexity. The system keeps improving. Customers love it. It’s already enabling better penetration and a lower cost structure. And it’s ready to scale.
It can all add up to be the start of a new operating model—and a tightly-governed change system.