AI Assistants and Preparedness Among Enterprises - with Chris Caldwell of Concentrix

**Daniel Faggella** (0:12)
Welcome everyone to the Emerge AI in Business Podcast. Today's guest is Chris Caldwell, President and CEO at Concentrix Corporation. Chris joins us to break down where agentic AI actually breaks inside the enterprise. Not at the customer interface, but in approval gates, order trails, and compliance checks built for human throughput. He walks through why digital delegates with final authority are safer than full digital twins, how poorly tuned agents can burn more cash than the humans they replace, and what most leaders are getting wrong about readiness. In this episode, we cover the operational realities of deploying agentic AI inside enterprise environments. To go deeper on this topic and learn how to evaluate AI vendors by assessing leadership expertise and why funding benchmarks can signal product maturity and stability, download our free PDF report, Five Ways to Select the Right AI Vendor at emerge.com/aiv2.
That's emerj.com/aiv2 to download your copy. Now the conversation with Chris.
Chris, it's lovely to have you in our Emerj AI Research Studio today.

**Chris Caldwell** (1:41)
Great, it's very nice to be here.

**Daniel Faggella** (1:43)
So we've been hearing a lot about AI moving from something that used to just help us write and summarize to systems that actually act in making decisions and sometimes even transacting on our behalf. So there's a lot for us to dive into today and to dissect, especially with the hype around agentic AI and digital delegates running, well, basically running into end workflows at this stage. But I think the best starting point would be for me to ask you, where do you see enterprises feel the first points of friction when assistants start acting inside of workflows?

**Chris Caldwell** (2:14)
Well, it's a great question. The reality is that most enterprises haven't necessarily thought through all the parameters they need to deal with. The first is, even when you're thinking about, you talked about digital delegates. Is it a digital delegate? Is there a digital twin? Do you have all my authority and are doing everything that I can do? Or am I giving you a set of authority that you can act upon? And some companies even get tripped up on that. That's the first thing. The second thing is, a lot of the workflows and systems that enterprises have have been really designed for humans. I mean, they're used to a human speed. They're used to a human number of transactions going in. They sometimes have shut down windows on the weekends at nights to kind of do the batch processing on the back end on some of the big large enterprises. And then all of a sudden, with some of the agentic work that you can do, you can 10x that, 100x that, 1000x that. And then bottlenecks start creeping up within the workflow that starts to cause a lot of problems. And so you somewhat have to almost stress test the system to make sure that it can handle the amount of volume that you're going to kind of anticipate and drive. And then really sort of the last one is really around kind of thinking through the security measures that happen. We see oftentimes people try and rush into it. They start to kind of implement stuff and then they start to realize, my goodness, fraud is picked up because we didn't realize that a human was actually needing to touch this. Or they start to realize that humans, because of the volume, are just now pressing click, click, click, click approve of all the agentic work versus actually kind of looking at it and digesting it, which historically has happened when it's more of a human pace. So lots of sort of challenges need to drive all the friction points that you have to kind of get in front of before you can really get some benefits out of the agentics.

**Daniel Faggella** (3:46)
So two points that I want to get on to that. The first thing, if we talk about speed and I think the term that is being thrown around is machine speed. What does machine speed actually break inside the process that is designed for humans?

**Chris Caldwell** (4:00)
Well, it's a couple things. Some of the legacy enterprises that we deal with, where machine speed breaks down is that they're not used to handling the number of transactions, like just in terms of the end of day clearing that they need to do, the system downtime windows that they need to do, are just not big enough to process the amount of transactions that have now been processed through agentics. That's one. The second thing is that there's some physical sign-offs that sometimes happen within workflow processes where a manager approves all the work that the people do. Now, that manager normally approves maybe 100, 200, 300 claims a day, and suddenly he's now needing to look at 5,000. Do you really think he's spending the time looking at it, or do you think he's just going, approve it, I'm sure the machine did it properly? Exactly. I'm sure the machine is better than me, so I'm just going to approve it. So those are the things that we talk about, machine speed, that somewhat breaks some of the processes that have happened where systems have historically been built off of human labor that is going into them.