White Paper: AI Agents for Enterprise-Grade Agentic Process Automation

AI agents represent a paradigm shift, moving beyond simple rule-based task execution to complex, goal-oriented decision-making. AI agents can receive an abstract goal and input, formulate a plan to achieve that goal, and then use a set of “tools” to execute that plan. This white paper seeks to define AI agents, explain the critical components of an AI agent, and present a framework for the successful, timely, and cost-effective implementation of AI agents in the enterprise. We additionally address the emerging new concept of C3 AI Agentic Process Automation with advanced AI agent-assisted reasoning to unlock outsized economic value at scale. C3 AI has invested deeply in building an agentic architecture purpose-built for the complexity of enterprise environments.