I was at Tencent’s Global Digital Ecosystem Summit in Shenzhen. It’s my favorite event for Tencent and one of my favorites for AI and cloud. You can get a good read on their strategy and product focus.

And this year’s event was all about the Agentic strategy.

And specifically, about WorkBuddy, which is the centerpiece of Tencent’s agentic strategy.

The WorkBuddy character was literally everywhere.

In this first article, I’m going to focus on the opening talk by Dowson Tong. He is a Senior Executive Vice President at Tencent and the Chief Executive Officer of Tencent’s Cloud and Smart Industries Group (CSIG).

Basically, he’s the key guy to listen to for Tencent’s agentic strategy.

And I had 6 lessons from his talk (in my opinion).

Lesson 1: The Big Prize Is Agentic-First Organizations

The big prize is to help businesses become agentic-first. And Tencent Cloud wants to be the partner of choice for this for every business, industry and scenario.

Their main pitch is that they make agentic operations convenient, efficient (low cost), reliable and secure.

Overall, that’s both daring and sweeping.

They are right to argue that this is the biggest change we have ever seen in organizations. There is a reason I have switched to this as my primary topic. And my business is now called “Agentic Org Now”. Could I be more direct?

Dowson started his talk with the slide:

“Multi-agent and data-driven flywheels transforming real world productivity”

That is actually a really great summary. It’s wordy but it has the biggest ideas in one half sentence.

Agents Empower Individuals. Agentic Organizations Are the Hard Part.

Tencent (and many others) make the point (correctly) that AI and agents are very good at empowering individuals.

We are all getting massive increases in our capabilities and productivity. It’s like getting superpowers.

But the big prize (and challenge) is to go from an agentic-powered individual to an agentic-first organization. That’s the sweeping transformation. But it’s way more complicated.

Agentic-first organizations are completely new entities.

These are organizations centered around agents, instead of humans. That means new systems, ways of working and roles for humans. It transforms both operations and strategy.

And what we are looking for is a huge increase in enterprise productivity. That’s the ultimate KPI. You’ll hear Tencent Cloud mention enterprise productivity all the time now.

And let’s be blunt.

Human-Centric Companies Won’t Be Able to Compete

Human-centric organizations will not be able to compete with agentic-first organizations in most endeavors. Elon Musk has been saying this in stark terms. Once you remove the last human from the loop, the agentic organization takes off like a rocket ship.

“Corporations that are purely AI and robotics will vastly outperform any corporations that have people in the loop.” – Elon Musk

Now, I think that is overstated. I’ve been talking about HARCO, which is human-agent-robot combined operations. I think that’s closer to the future of operations.

Ok, that’s the big picture.

There Are 3 Tipping Points to Becoming Agentic-First

These are like the superpowers you must acquire as an enterprise.

1. Data flywheels. Agents operate best when they have clear goals and data feedback loops. This is how they can operate autonomously. The data feedback also lets them get smarter in terms of data intelligence. And it lets them improve what they are doing and progress towards their goals.
2. Autonomous activity. This is when you switch from human approved and supported tasks to truly autonomous agents, with little or no human involvement. This is when you can be dramatically faster at a task. And you can scale up from 1 to 100 or 1,000 agents. You can’t scale up with humans still in the loop.
3. From single agent to multi-agent. If you can make this transition, the capabilities of your organization will increase dramatically. Suddenly agents are working collaboratively. Think teams of agents. Or a lead agent giving orders to specialized agents.

Those are the three tipping points to look for in an organization. You’ll see big increases in enterprise productivity. Especially in areas like business analysis, business operations, industry research and marketing. Those are the four Dowson cited.

Dowson’s Opening Slide Sums Up the Whole Model

Now look again at the opening title of his talk:

“Multi-agent and data-driven flywheels transforming real world productivity.”

I see most everything I like in that phrase. They are focused on multi-agents and data-driven flywheels. Two of the superpowers. And that results in real world productivity. That’s a pretty good summary of the skeleton of an agentic organization.

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In the next part, I’ll go through the other 5 lessons.

Jeff

• WorkBuddy Is Now the Hub of Tencent’s Agentic Strategy (2 of 5) (Tech Strategy)

Disclosure. I have had a paid consulting relationship with Tencent in the past twelve months.

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I am a founder, consultant and keynote speaker specialized in digital and AI agentic strategy.

I am the founder of Agentic Org Now, a firm that helps leadership teams launch AI and agentic initiatives fast.

I write (a lot) about digital and digital AI strategy (3 best selling books, +2.9M followers on LinkedIn). You can get a free book at the email sign-up below.

My Moats and Marathons book series is a framework for building and measuring competitive advantages in digital and AI businesses.

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