Critical considerations for CIOs to navigate the future of AI-powered business

There is a sizeable challenge facing CIOs and enterprise leaders to continually modernise systems and maintain the skills they need to build resilience for the next decade in AI-powered businesses. According to Grand View Research, the enterprise Agentic AI market is growing exponentially, with a projected CAGR of 46.2% from 2025 to 2030. For tech leaders, the buck stops with them to navigate an enterprise through a highly complex, unknown and much-hyped AI environment.

For businesses, embracing Agentic AI in 2025 isn’t just about automating tasks; it’s about giving systems the power to manage and optimise entire business functions on their own.  In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70 percent of organisations will operationalise AI designed for autonomy.

Executive leadership, department heads and developers alike are exploring the many ways that AI can benefit their roles, their teams, their customers and the bottom line. But many things must line up for AI success. Only with the right planning and digital tech innovation will CIOs be best placed to succeed in the challenging second half of this decade and beyond.

What are some of the most exciting real-world applications for AI technologies today? 

In business terms, the use of AI translates to speed, insight and efficiency, irrespective of industry deployment. In financial services alone, AI has already emerged as the dominant force reshaping the financial landscape, transforming risk assessment, fraud detection, and hyper-personalised services. 

By combining virtual factory management solutions with AI, an AI-powered copilot can revolutionise how users interact with virtual factory environments. In harnessing natural language, advanced scene understanding, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), users have the ability to intuitively query, analyse, and optimise complex virtual scenes. This empowers users to make smarter decisions faster, enhancing productivity and efficiency in digital twin environments. In terms of business benefits, an Agentic AI platform can streamline operations, boost multichannel interactions, and drive exceptional customer satisfaction.

In the automotive industry, Software Defined Vehicles (SDVs) featuring AI-driven technology are emerging as an attractive and efficient auto manufacturing method. Taking this a step further is FPT's “AI-first SDV” approach - a significant shift from traditional software to AI-based solutions. AI can revolutionise driver assistance, personalise in-car entertainment and increase user engagement by up to 35%.

In healthcare, next-generation AI solutions are in place today supporting medical consultants and their teams in many ways. This ranges from guiding junior doctors in complex decision-making, offering prognostic insights in oncology or cardiology and being tools to optimise orthopaedic recovery, pain management, rehabilitation, and fall prevention.

In software development, Agentic AI can provide intelligent code suggestions, identify patterns, and enhance coding standards, enabling developers to work smarter and deliver better quality code faster. To protect business from its biggest threat - data breaches - Agentic AI can detect risks, prompt instant response, and automate recovery to protect data and minimise downtime.

Why is Agentic AI so important and how can business leaders take advantage of this?

The long-term impacts of Agentic AI are broader and more significant than those of Generative AI. When combined, they create sophisticated systems with huge potential for efficiency, precise information parsing, and smarter decision-making. With actionable insights faster than any human team, this has the power to change critical functions with unparalleled precision.

Generally considered by experts as stage three of five stages in the development of AI, Agentic AI sits between the conversational and reasoning stages (one and two) and innovating and organisational AI stages (four and five). Put another way, GenAI has revolutionised the way we create content, but Agentic AI has the potential to automate even more complex processing tasks. Starting from a more advanced perspective, it powerfully draws on multiple agents to autonomously learn and adapt to give rapid automated decisions.

Over time, Agentic AI will begin to manifest itself in the physical world, perhaps driving robotics to make decisions and operating effectively in complex physical environments that only years ago was pure fiction.

How can enterprise leaders best gain, extract and analyse the vast amount of data for meaningful business insights?

For decades, enterprises have focused analytics strategies on structured data, which can be stored and analysed neatly in charts. Yet many of the best context-specific details that can produce meaningful business insights for Agentic AI are found in unstructured formats. This content is typically spread across many siloed servers, collaboration tools and archives.

Since their AI tools being only as good as the quality of their data, CIOs and data strategists are now scrambling to organise and activate these diverse data sources so AI models can tap into their full potential. Harnessing unstructured data is a necessity to unlocking next-level possibilities.

One emerging strategy is RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) which can turn this data into knowledge so that it can work with AI to enhance their decision making and drive innovation.

RAG combines GenAI with detailed, relevant data to deliver accurate, reliable and useful insights. It connects business data with generative AI models, adding specific context and meaning while identifying and reducing hallucinations in the AI’s response. This context often comes from taxonomies or ontologies, which help the AI understand the data.     

What are the three most important considerations for enterprises to ensure success in AI-enabled digital transformation?

There are some key considerations to ensure the safe and beneficial use of Agentic AI. As with any new technology, there is likely a long journey for Agentic AI to become a trusted and commoditised technology solution. Improving Agentic AI requires addressing the biggest AI ethical concerns like bias mitigation, transparency, and privacy. Added to this, technical advancements in learning algorithms, perception and hardware will also be crucial. Developing effective human-AI collaboration, including skill augmentation and continuous learning, is also essential. 

It goes without saying that strategic data practices and cybersecurity are essential. There is also the issue of potential emergent behaviour, as AI systems become more complex, when they can exhibit unexpected behaviours. Therefore, control and safety aspects will be a hurdle in AI development. Working through these considerations will develop trust and viability of Agentic AI as a safe and beneficial technology.

Yet while we may encounter unforeseen ethical dilemmas and societal implications, Agentic AI has become an indisputable complement to GenAI, with the power to automate decision-making processes, revolutionise industries and drive unprecedented transformation. Beyond being one to watch, forward-thinking enterprise business leaders will be exploring Agentic AI’s potential for the next generation of business.

How is FPT leading the Vietnam charge for AI

Over the last three decades (founded in 1988), FPT Corporation (FPT) has grown and developed into a global IT firm, combining global delivery capabilities with a deep understanding of local markets. It is the country’s biggest listed tech firm and a powerhouse for the digital technologies that are driving the future of business. Today, FPT operates in over 30 markets, with over 80,000 employees.

Facing a national shortage of skilled digital talent, the company founded FPT University in 2006, in a move to build a pipeline of future-ready software engineers. FPT now has over 150,000 students nationally and 180 partners from 40 countries 500,000 software developers nationally and ambitions to lead in AI and semiconductors.

FPT’s core tech expertise in semiconductor and AI which is already driving innovation that is reshaping dozens of industries. In fact, the Vietnam government looks to FPT in its quest to have three AI centres and at least 100 chip design companies in Vietnam by 2030. As part of this, FPT plans to train 10,000 semiconductor engineers and 50,000 AI specialists.

Rapidly expanding in the UK, one of FPT’s most prestigious UK partnerships is with Chelsea Football Club. As an official digital transformation partner, FPT aims to deliver next-level performance and experience on and off the field for Chelsea fans, enterprises and communities worldwide.

How can Vietnam as an outsourcing region offer superior innovation and software engineering as an enabler of UK business growth?

Vietnam has earned its status as a premier global digital hub for two key reasons - digital development and its entrepreneurial ecosystem. 

Its people are central to Vietnam’s growing success – it is among the leading countries in the world with the most IT graduates (around 60,000 annually), at universities offering STEM-focused curricula, including AI, Cloud, IoT, and Big Data. The country’s focus on AI, digital transformation and semiconductors, is expected to grow to more than $43B by 2025. FPT alone has set up 16 elementary to high school campuses where children as young as first grade begin learning programming languages.

Vietnam has emerged as a well-respected global digital hub with a tech community that is setting new standards in business and technology. Vietnam’s commitment to becoming a digital hub, with access to cutting-edge technology and partnerships with leading software designers and manufacturers, complements its location and economic appeal.  

The country’s central location in Southeast Asia is a strategic hub for accessing regional markets, which appeals to manufacturers, while its free trade agreements with key markets like the EU, South Korea, and Japan further boost export opportunities.