What’s fueling the AI innovation at major enterprises? It’s an easy answer, right? It’s reliable, trustworthy, and impactful data. While true, there’s more to the answer here — gathering that data is only one piece of the puzzle.

With traditional analytics and machine learning, the focus was always applied to uncovering actionable insights, but in an AI-driven world, we’re empowering agents to act on this data autonomously with little to no human intervention.  

Capitalizing on the rise of AI agents requires enterprises to leverage low-code/no-code agentic frameworks to bridge disparate IT systems and enable intelligent automation.  At Cloudera, we’re focused on what it takes to build that foundation. 

At the end of 2024, we announced a partnership with CrewAI that represents the next big leap forward. Through this partnership, we’re empowering developers and data teams to build agentic systems that can plan, decide, and act securely at scale. And the benefits extend beyond developers,  they now have the tools to enable domain experts to create agents and workflows on their own, without needing deep technical expertise.

Agentic AI is one of the hottest topics out there. It’s something I’ve talked about in my last two articles, covering both the state of play for enterprise adoption as well as the use cases that are redefining major industries. 

With that said, let’s take an even deeper look at the world of AI agents, and how my own organization – Cloudera – is working to shape the future with this powerful technology. 

Agentic systems are the future of enterprise AI

Enterprise AI has seen all sorts of innovation throughout the years and has fueled many data-driven organizations. But the next phase of enterprise AI isn’t just about faster dashboards or better predictions, it’s about systems that can coordinate tasks, self-correct, and execute with autonomy.

That desire leads us straight back to the prolific rise of AI agents. This technology brings vast potential and can be applied in a multitude of different use cases. From agents that optimize workloads in real time to agents that detect and respond to operational risks to agents that codevelop with software developers and data engineers. Almost anything core IT systems can accomplish can be turned over to agentic AI to be performed on behalf of humans. 

At Cloudera, we’ve explored this topic in depth and recently conducted a study to help understand the state of agentic AI adoption among enterprise leaders. Unsurprisingly, the consensus of those we surveyed?

Near-unanimous plans to increase and scale up the use of AI agents. In fact, the survey found a massive 96% of enterprises reported they plan to expand their use of AI agents this year, with a focus on performance optimization and security. 

While hype surrounded the arrival of GenAI, delaying adoption in the process, agentic AI is being met with enthusiasm and strategic roadmapping. But here’s the challenge: building these agents in a compliant, composable, and enterprise-grade way isn’t easy. It takes the right tools and the right partners to help make it happen. 

That’s what makes a move like Cloudera’s partnership with CrewAI so impactful. 

Partnering with CrewAI: A perfect pair at the perfect time 

Partnering with CrewAI is a major moment for us at Cloudera. They have built one of the most promising open-source frameworks for orchestrating AI agents in teams. But beyond that, CrewAI is in complete alignment with Cloudera and our vision for enterprise-grade AI enablement.

What does this team-up mean? Together, we’re enabling: 

• Agentic ETL: These agents help manage and automate complex extract, transform, and load (ETL) tasks, ingesting data from a diverse set of sources and seeing it all the way through transformation.
• Self-healing pipelines: Enterprise IT leaders can’t afford to play catch up or deal with the cost of downtime. Cloudera and CrewAI deliver autonomous agents that can detect failures, reroute processes, and alert the right stakeholders.
• Autonomous app integration: Agents powered by Cloudera and CrewAI are able to interact with APIs, LLMs, and business systems to complete tasks with minimal human oversight. This includes generating dynamic reports, facilitating cross-organizational data access, and enabling real-time decision-making.

Above all, though, Cloudera and CrewAI’s autonomous agents offer enterprises flexibility as these agents are not locked into a specific cloud or vendor. Whether it’s on-premises, in the cloud, or both, they can run effectively on Cloudera’s hybrid data platform.

Where do enterprises get started? 

Again, agentic AI hasn’t arrived on the hype train. AI agents are not merely a vision of the future, they are our building blocks in the present. We’re using them to generate tangible business value by optimizing workflows, autonomously detecting and resolving anomalies and failures, and interacting with complex systems with little human oversight (when appropriate).

Developers are leveraging highly flexible and interoperable tools to unlock new opportunities to reshape the way we achieve operational efficiency. Cloudera’s integration with CrewAI offers prebuilt agent workflows for common data tasks and integration with LLMs like OpenAI on Azure, Amazon Bedrock, and Anthropic. And if you’re on Cloudera, all of that comes with the assurance that security and governance are baked in from the start, infusing essential metadata tracking and access controls.

The bottom line: From insight to impact

AI agents are deeply transformative. They will change the game by streamlining mission-critical workflows. Autonomous agents will not replace your team members; instead, they will enable data and analytics teams to redefine and reshape business operations. By teaming up with CrewAI, Cloudera is putting agentic AI directly into the hands of enterprise developers and data teams today.

As the next generation of AI innovations simmer and percolate, enterprise success won’t be determined by who has the most data or by who analyzes it most effectively, it will be driven by organizations that crew AI agents navigating from rivers to insight to oceans of action.

About the Author:

Shayde Christian is Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Cloudera. Christian guides data-driven cultural change for Cloudera to generate maximum value from data. He enables Cloudera customers to get the absolute best from their Cloudera products such that they can generate high-value use cases for competitive advantage.

Previously a principal consultant, Shayde formulated data strategy for Fortune 500 clients and designed, constructed, or turned around failing enterprise information management organizations. Shayde enjoys laughter and is often the cause of it.