That's precisely what we found in our research as well! We outlined it in our observations too (excerpt below):
The most successful deployment strategies we’ve seen started with:
simple and specific use cases with clear value drivers, that were low risk yet medium impact;
weren’t majorly disruptive to existing workflows;
preferably automating a task that the human user dislikes (or was outsourced);
the output of the workflow can be easily/quickly verified by the human for accuracy or suitability; and
demonstrated clear ROI quickly
Given the current levels of technological development, AI Agents work best when narrowly applied to very specific tasks and operating under a specific context. For instance, we’ve seen this in healthcare with revenue cycle management processes (claim and denial management) that health systems were already outsourcing to third-party providers.
The land-and-expand strategy for AI agents is very different to traditional SaaS. Given enterprises are increasingly under pressure from the C-Suite to incorporate AI into their work, there are plenty of opportunities for startups to “land” but it’s much harder to “expand” – and not only that, it’s taking much longer to expand even when they want to expand, because it’s a use case by use case rollout.
Much like the iconic Volkswagen ad, sometimes it’s better to “Think Small” and build trust first, rather than attempt too many use cases (and excessively complex use cases) right off the bat.
We recently spoke with 30+ startup founders and 40+ enterprise practitioners who are building and deploying agentic AI systems across industries like financial services, healthcare, cybersecurity, and developer tooling.
A few patterns emerged that might be relevant to anyone working on applied AI or automation:
- The main blockers aren’t technical. Most founders pointed to workflow integration, employee trust, and data privacy as the toughest challenges — not model performance.
- Incremental deployment beats ambition. Successful teams focus on narrow, verifiable use cases that deliver measurable ROI and build user trust before scaling autonomy.
- Enterprise adoption is uneven. Many companies have “some agents” in production, but most use them with strong human oversight. The fully autonomous cases remain rare.
- Pricing is unresolved. Hybrid models dominate; pure outcome-based pricing is uncommon due to attribution and monitoring challenges.
Infrastructure is mostly homegrown. Over half of surveyed startups build their own agentic stacks, citing limited flexibility in existing frameworks.
The article also includes detailed case studies, commentary on autonomy vs. accuracy trade-offs, and what’s next for ambient and proactive agents.
Would be interested to hear how others on HN are thinking about real-world deployment challenges — especially around trust, evaluation, and scaling agentic systems.
Perhaps I simply don't understand what you mean, but it sounds like the first point could be rephrased in some way. To me, workflow integration and data privacy sound very much like technical blockers.
Consider this simple example: Storing all your sensitive user data in one centralized location (e.g. a US server) would be great for any kind of analytics and modeling to tap into, and is technically very easy to do, but it also violates virtually every country's data privacy laws. So then you have to set up siloed servers around the world, deal with data governance, legal stuff, etc.
Sure, it then becomes a technical challenge to work around those limits, but that may be cost/time prohibitive.
More than the "actual" problem, the "perception" of the problem is worse. Workflow integration is more to do with users having to rethink their workflows, their roles, and how they work with AI. As for data privacy concerns, even where startups have taken measures to overcome the problems, very often enterprises still remain concerned (making this more of a perception problem than an actual problem). That's why I focused on the non-technical aspect of it!
When I see vendors complain about workflow and integration issues, it's because the vendors software is written around an expectation of a certain workflow and integration points and they find out in reality every customer does it slightly differently.
Some key challenges around workflow are that while the fundamental white-board task flow is the same, different companies may distribute those tasks between people and over time in different ways.
Workflow is about flowing the task and associated information between people - not just doing the tasks.
Same goes for integration - the timing of when certain necessary information might be available again not uniform and timing concerns are often missed on the high level whiteboard.
Here's a classic example of ignoring timing issues.
One is technical (it’s a hassle to connect things to a specific system because you’d need to deal with the api or there is no api)
The other isn’t, because it’s figuring out how and where to use these new tools in an existing workflow. Maybe you could design something from scratch but you have lots of business processes right now, how do you smoothly modify that? Where does it make sense?
Frankly understanding what the systems can and can’t do takes at least some time even if only because the field is moving so fast (I worked with a small local firm who I was able to help by showing them the dramatic improvements in transcription quality vs cost recently - people here are more used to whisper and the like but it’s not as common knowledge how and where you can use these things).
Lack of employee trust in these systems is caused by model (under)performance. There's a HUGE disconnect between the C-suite right now and the people on the ground using these models. Anyone who builds something with the models would tell you that they can't be trusted.
> The main blockers aren’t technical. Most founders pointed to workflow integration, employee trust, and data privacy as the toughest challenges — not model performance.
What does that even mean? Are you trying to say that the problem isn’t that the AI models are bad — it’s that it’s hard to get people to use them naturally in their daily work?
For example where I work business users required model output to be 100% correct, which wasn't possible, so they decided to stick to old manual workflow.
That’s our definition of a process: when your objective is well-defined, a process is guaranteed to succeed. Not everything is a process. And sometimes people mistake what the desired success must be. For example, a piece of surgical equipment might not have features guaranteeing profitability.
I’m not sure this is the case, here (although it’s always a possibility, sadly).
It just looks like the highly-polished marketing copy I’ve read, all my career. It’s entirely possible that it was edited by AI (a task that I have found useful), but I think that it’s actually a fairly important (to the firm) paper, and was likely originally written by their staff (or a consultant), and carefully edited.
I do feel as if it’s a promotional effort, but HN often features promotional material, if it is of interest to our community.
