47% of Large-Company Executives Comfortable with AI Agents Acting on Behalf of Customers

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NLX 

Mar 13, 2025, 06:00 ET

70% Approve of Agentic AI Planning and Booking Travel; 14% are Comfortable with It Handling Air Traffic Control

NEW YORK, March 13, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — NLX, the AI platform powering advanced conversational experiences for the world’s most admired brands, today announced the results of a commissioned survey of U.S. executives in companies with 5,000 or more employees. The survey, which focused on agentic AI, was conducted by QuestionPro, an independent online research, insights, and experience company.

Enterprise executives are grappling with how to leverage agentic AI in their organizations, especially amid recent market and media hype. NLX wanted to know more about executive comfort level with agentic AI acting on behalf of customers, including types of tasks and the form of agentic AI that could have the most impact on the customer experience.

General comfort level with agentic AI

Nearly half of executives (47%) said they are comfortable having agentic AI make decisions and complete tasks for their customers, full stop. A smaller number (40%) said it depended on the task. Just 11% said they were not comfortable.

Comfort level around specific tasks

“The fact that a non-trivial amount of executives at enterprise organizations are fine having agentic AI prescribe medicine or control air traffic shows a lack of understanding of the current capabilities of the technology,” said Andrei Papancea, NLX co-founder and CEO. “With today’s AI error rates, even the most conservative estimates would translate to several catastrophic events and deaths per day with those two use cases alone.”

Travel planning, grading papers, and applying for jobs were the tasks chosen most often by executives as something they would be comfortable having AI agents do. Still, 22% would be comfortable having AI prescribe medication, and 14% would be comfortable with AI handling air traffic control.

Being focused on the practical application of AI technology, NLX stresses that all AI, including agentic AI, is rooted in statistics, which means that some of its conclusions and decisions will be wrong. This is why it cannot be turned loose on structured business processes where even the smallest error rate has unacceptable consequences, despite what news headlines and pundits might suggest.

Highest potential to improve customer experience and satisfaction

Robotic process automation (RBA) and conversational experiences were nearly tied for the form of AI with the most potential to improve customer experiences and satisfaction, 37% and 35%, respectively. Autonomous backend systems were close behind, with 28% of executive respondents thinking it had the highest potential.

Methodology

This survey was conducted by QuestionPro in February 2025 of employees of U.S.-based companies. Of the 100 responses, 45 employees worked at companies with 5,000 to 10,000 employees, and 55 at companies with 10,000 or more employees. All of the respondents had a director-level title or higher.

About NLX

NLX is an enterprise AI platform for building and managing chat, voice, and multimodal applications at scale. As human interactions with technology become increasingly conversation-based, NLX makes it practical for organizations to create, deploy, and manage conversational experiences for any industry or use case; working in concert with any large language model and technology stack. NLX enables the world’s biggest brands, including Comcast, Red Bull, and United Airlines, among others, to invest in a future where interactions with technology mirror the natural ebb and flow of people’s day-to-day decision-making. Follow NLX on LinkedIn.

SOURCE NLX