Ephemeral Agents: The next horizon coming for agentic AI

As technology innovation accelerates at a breakneck pace, enterprises struggle to consume the technology already in front of them. First it was generative AI, then agentic. Now, there is a new horizon to the agentic era…ephemeral agents.

Ephemeral agents will drive another transformation in the agentic space that enterprises are largely unprepared for.

What are ephemeral agents?

Ephemeral agents are AI agents that are created by agents, ad-hoc, used for a specific task and then discarded. These ephemeral agents are unique and highly specialized.

The use of ephemeral agents requires a highly mature and cultural awareness of how technology intersects with business processes. The ephemeral nature of these agents puts automation on steroids.

Now, consider using these in your processes for customer experience, employee experience and/or business operations. One can quickly see where these could go.

While ephemeral agents are not a ‘thing’ yet, the precursors are already in-market, and it is only a matter of time before the acceleration of agentic AI adopts them.

The prospect of ephemeral agents will likely excite you and scare you at the same time.

Looking at the pros and cons

Let’s break down the pros and cons of ephemeral agents.

From a positive standpoint, ephemeral agents have the potential to reduce issues like agent sprawl and excess resource consumption. Resource constraints is already a concern for both hyperscalers and enterprises looking to run AI workloads locally. Agent sprawl is another concern I wrote about here and quickly rising as low-code and no-code capabilities democratize access to powerful AI capabilities. Ephemeral agents would potentially address both issues by maximizing use when needed and terminating agents when no longer in use.

On the downside, and there are many, ephemeral agents accelerate the issues already challenging enterprises today. Of those, automation, governance, regulatory and culture bubble to the surface.

The very nature of ephemeral agents requires a sophisticated automation capability within the agentic framework. This comes at a point when enterprises struggle with cultural hurdles of simply automating business processes. And now ephemeral agents requires that you put the steps of automation in the hands of agentic frameworks. That is likely a step too far for many enterprises today.

From a regulatory and governance standpoint, the regulatory agencies are largely not up to speed with the concept of agents and auditability. Enterprises are currently working with regulatory bodies to help them move forward. Move to ephemeral agents and it brings up many of the same conversations we faced years ago with ephemeral containers but with significantly more potential impact.

Governance models will require more flexibility than currently being identified for current agentic frameworks to accommodate the ephemeral nature of the agents. Enterprises are struggling with data strategies to bring the right data together to feed agents while maintaining governance models associated with the different sets of data. Enterprises must maintain the varied governance models for regulatory, compliance and privacy requirements. Many times, these are spread across a variety of enterprise solutions and not contained within a single enterprise application. 

While today the hurdles are significant, once they are addressed, the upsides will take hold and drive adoption of ephemeral agents.

From the CIO perspective

Ephemeral agents will likely accelerate the adoption curve of agentic AI in general. Many of the current cultural and governance challenges will likely be more quickly addressed to adopt the next horizon of innovation.

We already see the pace of innovation accelerating. Security, governance, regulatory and cultural challenges will be the largest issues holding back adoption of ephemeral agents. Those are largely the same issues holding back agentic AI in general.

At the same time, CIOs need to keep a healthy balance of pressing forward and accelerating their adoption of innovation, while maintaining healthy use of guardrails to ensure risk is well understood and managed.