Apple launches Siri AI as tech giants race to deploy autonomous agents

The era of AI that merely answers questions is giving way to one where AI systems act on their own. Across the technology industry, companies are racing to deploy autonomous AI agents capable of executing complex, multi-step workflows with minimal human oversight — a shift that analysts and executives say is redefining how businesses operate.

From Copilots to Autonomous Workers

The transition marks a structural change in enterprise software. Where AI assistants once waited for prompts, agentic AI systems now plan, reason, and take action — accessing databases, orchestrating tools, and adjusting their approach when initial efforts fail. Gartner ↗ 9.73% forecasts that 40% of enterprise applications will embed task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. The research firm also named agentic AI its top cybersecurity trend for 2026, reflecting both the technology's promise and its risks.ctomagazine+4

The numbers suggest the shift is already underway. An estimated 31% of enterprises now run at least one AI agent in production, led by banking and insurance at roughly 47%, according to data cited by S&P Global ↗ 1.91% Market Intelligence and McKinsey. The AI agents market reached $12.06 billion in 2026 and is projected to grow to $53.2 billion by 2030.paul-okhrem+1

Major Players Race to Deploy

Salesforce ↗ 4.73% on September 11 launched Agentforce 360, a portfolio of seven purpose-built AI agents — each assigned to a specific business function such as sales, customer service, commerce, and supply chain — along with a new governance and management layer. The company said it had delivered 7 billion "Agentic Work Units" across thousands of customer deployments.salesforce+1

Apple ↗ 0.24% joined the push on September 14 with the public release of Siri AI, a rebuilt assistant that can autonomously chain actions across apps — searching messages, pulling up recipes from emails, and adding ingredients to a grocery list in a single exchange. Microsoft ↗ 1.97% now lists more than 4,000 AI apps and agents in its marketplace alongside 11,000 AI models.apple+1

Adoption Outpaces Governance

The rapid rollout has created governance headaches. VentureBeat reported that as autonomous agents execute business processes in real time, the gap between a decision and its consequences is shrinking, forcing governance "out of the compliance calendar and into daily operations". Gartner has warned that by mid-2026, many organizations will struggle to explain why an AI agent made a high-risk decision, creating regulatory and legal liabilities. The firm has also predicted that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 due to scoping and oversight failures.venturebeat+2

"What separates genuine agentic AI from rebranded automation" are three capabilities, according to industry analysts: autonomous reasoning, tool orchestration, and persistent context — traits that only about 130 of thousands of claimed AI agent vendors are actually building.insentragroup