Consumer-facing industries - retail, travel, hospitality, and financial services - are the fastest adopters of AI agents (www.zdnet.com)

Salesforce’s Agentic Enterprise Index shows a sharp surge in enterprise AI agent adoption in H1 2025: leading companies created 119% more agents (Jan–Jun), employee interactions grew ~65% month-over-month, and agent actions tied to employee conversations rose ~76% monthly. Consumer-facing sectors are moving fastest—travel & hospitality (+133% monthly), retail (+128%), and financial services (+105%)—while service organizations saw customer-service conversations led by agents multiply ~22x and an average-business six‑month CAGR of ~2,199% for agent-handled support dialogs. Broader worker adoption also jumped 233% since fall 2024, with daily AI users reporting big gains in productivity, focus, and job satisfaction; Salesforce projects a $450B opportunity by 2028. Technically, the report frames the “agentic enterprise” as organizations deploying autonomous, goal-oriented agents that reason, plan multi-step workflows, continuously learn from feedback, and integrate tightly with enterprise systems. Top use cases are customer service, internal automation, and sales (email drafting, to‑dos, scheduling), with agents handling FAQs, order inquiries, knowledge retrieval and routing, and escalating complex issues—escalations to humans rose from 22% to 32% (Q1→Q2). For AI/ML practitioners this validates priorities: robust multi-step planning, retrieval and state management, continuous learning/feedback loops, safe escalation policies, and scalable orchestration to turn predictive and generative models into reliable autonomous workflows.