Pascal Bornet > Quotes

“Ask four times in a row your preferred LLM-based AI Chatbot: “Create a formula to calculate the total cost of items priced at $100, $50, and $30 with a 10% sales tax.” Running this prompt across different sessions will produce inconsistent formulas.”
― Pascal Bornet, Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life

“Alexander Fleming noticed an unusual mold growing on his petri dishes in 1928, he wasn’t just seeing an inconvenience—he was witnessing a revolution in medicine that would become penicillin. Similarly, when we first encountered AI systems that could maintain persistent goals and take autonomous action, we realized we weren’t just looking at a better chatbot—we were seeing the emergence of something fundamentally new.”
― Pascal Bornet, Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life

“something fundamental about the future of AI: it’s not just about making faster decisions, but about making better, more carefully considered ones. In a world increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence, understanding this distinction could mean the difference between AI systems that truly help us and those that simply rush us toward mistakes at higher speeds.”
― Pascal Bornet, Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life

“some work activities are displaced, but new ones, more fulfilling and value-adding, arise. What are the new ones? Think of these activities that everyone knows are crucial, but that actually none has the time to perform – for example, spending one hour per week with each team member to coach them.”
― Pascal Bornet, INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human

“Current agents cannot truly internalize or understand the relative importance of different objectives in the way humans naturally do through experience and context. Instead, they operate more like highly sophisticated pattern-matching systems, trying to find solutions that match their training data rather than truly understanding and resolving the underlying conflicts.”
― Pascal Bornet, Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life

“Today, more people die from overwork and stress than from wars. More than 75 percent of people are dissatisfied with their jobs, which they view as too tedious and repetitive. Countries are facing growing debts, a constant fear of a coming recession, and later retirement ages. The cost of human error and fraud is almost equivalent to the total amount of money allocated globally to education.”
― Pascal Bornet, INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human

“Think big, start small, and scale fast”: Initiate the transformation with the definition of a multi-year, company-wide vision, roadmap, and business case. These plans need to be flexible and adaptable. Then, “start small” with the implementation of a pilot, and take the time to learn from this first experience. Finally, implement the broader scope in stages to manage the risks. Gradually increase the speed and scale of the transformation, and as a result, generate high impact. “IA is a business transformation, not a technology project”: The perspective of business benefits should guide the transformation. This transformation involves not only technology, but more importantly, people – with change management, and retraining – and processes – with redesigns. “IA is a journey, not a destination”: IA is not a one-off exercise; it is a never-ending transformation journey. It continually brings additional benefits to the organization by applying evolving concepts, methods, and technologies. Hence, building teams with the right skills to guide the company in this transformation is critical. “Infusing IA into the culture of the company”: Implementing IA with siloed, isolated teams does not work. Automation needs to be infused into the company. Change management, education, empowerment, and incentivization of everyone in the company is vital. Every employee should know what IA is and what its benefits are, and be empowered and incentivized to identify use cases and build automation.”
― Pascal Bornet, INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human

“For a well-defined, standard, and stable process involving hand-offs between people and systems, it is preferable to use a smart workflow platform. Such platforms offer pre-developed modules. These are ready-to-use automation programs customized by industry and by business function (e.g., onboarding of clients in retail banking). In addition, they are modular. For example, a module might include a form for client data collection, and another module might support an approval workflow. In addition, these modules can be linked to external systems and databases using connectors, such as application programming interfaces (APIs), which enable resilient data connectivity. Hence, with smart workflows, there is no need to develop bespoke internal and external data bridges. This integration creates a system with high resiliency and integrity. In addition, the standardization by industry and function of these platforms, combined with the low-code functionality, helps to accelerate the implementation.”
― Pascal Bornet, INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human

“Ask your favorite generative AI system (such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini), “What is the future of marketing?” or any similar prompt. Take note of its response. Then, ask it a related question, like “How will AI influence that future?” and close your session. Next, start a new session and ask it to summarize your earlier conversation. Watch as the AI struggles to connect the dots. Expect inconsistencies, as the AI doesn’t truly “remember” or build persistent logic across sessions. This reveals its fragmented nature.”
― Pascal Bornet, Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life

“This metacognitive capability—thinking about thinking—has profound implications for business AI implementations. When the LRM encountered uncertainty or potential errors, it didn’t blindly proceed but instead acknowledged its limitations and adapted its approach.”
― Pascal Bornet, Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life

“As emphasized in the critical success factors related to “Management support, vision, governance, and structure” earlier in this section, a leading practice to secure support from management is to provide a high-level estimation of the benefits expected from the transformation. This is often referred to as a “high-level automation assessment” or a “top-down automation assessment”. For example, such an estimation might show that, by leveraging IA, the organization has the potential to increase revenue by 20% while reducing costs by 30% in the coming 18 months.”
― Pascal Bornet, INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human

“4. When to use RPA versus smart workflow platforms? These technologies can be used interchangeably. The leading practice is to use smart workflow and low-code platforms as a foundation of the overall automation platform. RPA is used when IA needs to be integrated with legacy systems or automation of bespoke processes.”
― Pascal Bornet, INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human

“Agentforce (specialized in sales and customer relationships),”
― Pascal Bornet, Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life

“our research has led us to a deeper appreciation of the human role in AI reasoning. Far from making human judgment obsolete, advanced AI systems seem to demand more sophisticated forms of human oversight and interaction. The most successful implementations we’ve seen don’t minimize human involvement—they transform it, elevating humans from mere operators to what we might call “cognitive choreographers,” orchestrating the interaction between different AI capabilities and ensuring their alignment with human values and objectives.”
― Pascal Bornet, Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life

“The talent required within the CoE is wide and ranges from business and operations excellence to risk and IT departments. According to McKinsey’s survey, the CoE of top-performing companies includes a large variety of profiles such as delivery managers, data scientists, data engineers, workflow integrators, system architects, developers, and, most critically, translators and business analysts.152 A”
― Pascal Bornet, INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human

“There are no ready-to-use modules with RPA. Most of the development is bespoke, and all process flows need to be built almost from scratch. The connections also need to be constructed. This results in a more flexible design and implementation of the programs developed, which can fit with more specific business requirements. The key advantage of RPA is that it allows the creation of automation programs that can involve legacy systems (e.g., those which can’t use APIs) or address non-standard requirements (e.g., onboarding of clients for a broker insurance company under Singapore regulations). However, with RPA, the lack of native integration amongst the components has weaknesses. For example, it involves less robustness, weaker data integrity, and lower resilience to process changes. If one part of an RPA program fails, the whole end-to-end process is stopped. As an outcome, based on our experience, the leading practice is to use low-code and smart workflow platforms as a foundation of the overall automation platform. In contrast, RPA is used for any integration of the overall platform with legacy systems or for automation of bespoke processes.”
― Pascal Bornet, INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human

“The long tail of lower-value automation opportunities should involve less focus on the redesign. The value will be captured through the systematic use of the lean methodology to improve the processes incrementally (e.g., simplify, reduce the number of actions).”
― Pascal Bornet, INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human

“In conclusion, smaller companies with a limited budget might opt for open source platforms. Larger, more established, and more demanding companies would typically go with a commercial platform, enabling them to connect their different applications under the same roof. Companies with high growth objectives should leverage scalable cloud-based platforms.”
― Pascal Bornet, INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human

“The cost of errors is enormous: o Medical errors in the US incur an estimated economic value of almost USD 1 trillion78 – and 86% of those mistakes are administrative.79 o 80% of US medical billings contain at least minor mistakes – creating unnecessary annual healthcare spending of $68 billion.80”
― Pascal Bornet, INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human

“3.1. New digital business building Insurance companies, banks, energy providers, and incumbent telecommunication companies need to digitalize their businesses to stay competitive against new pure digital entrants. In most cases, the fastest and most efficient way to achieve this is not to digitalize their existing business, but to create entirely new digital businesses that are highly automated.”
― Pascal Bornet, INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human

“instead of paying a freelancer to complete a task, you’re paying an AI agent to deliver the outcome autonomously. For example, on Fiverr, you might hire a human expert to research and summarize news articles for your newsletter, write product descriptions for your e-commerce store, or manage your social media posts.”
― Pascal Bornet, Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life

“Leveraging the support from consulting and delivery partners (they can be the same) is critical for gaining the right momentum in the organization with minimum investment.”
― Pascal Bornet, INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human

“The LRM’s ability to recognize and communicate its uncertainty provides perhaps the most crucial lesson for working with AI agents. As a user, you need to develop a sense of when to trust AI outputs and when to seek additional verification or human expertise.”
― Pascal Bornet, Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life

“For example, you might have heard of experimental systems like AutoGPT16 or BabyAGI,17 which gained popularity among enthusiasts. These are essentially wrapper agents around LLMs designed to autonomously pursue goals: they take a high-level goal from a user and then generate sub-tasks, execute them (often by issuing tool commands or even writing and running code), check the”
― Pascal Bornet, Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life

“The printing press democratized knowledge. The internet connected humanity. AI, in its agentic form, has the potential to amplify human capabilities in ways we’re only beginning to comprehend.”
― Pascal Bornet, Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life

“agentic AI systems can understand a goal, take initiative, maintain persistent objectives, and adapt their strategies based on real-world feedback. Put simply, an AI agent is a system that uses AI and tools to accomplish actions in order to reach a given goal autonomously.”
― Pascal Bornet, Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life

“Experimenting with Multi-Agent Conversations To truly grasp how AI agents interact, we suggest a simple experiment. This exercise demonstrates how two AI agents might communicate, negotiate, or even challenge each other—uncovering emergent dialogue behaviors. To conduct this experiment, open two instances of an AI chat, such as ChatGPT or Claude (for example, open two browser windows, each displaying a chatbot). Running these two AI chat instances side by side allows you to simulate a structured conversation between agents with different roles and goals. To start, assign Agent A as a financial advisor trying to convince Agent B, a skeptical client, to adopt a savings plan. Since the AIs can’t directly communicate, you’ll act as the messenger, relaying responses back and forth (copying and pasting them). As the conversation unfolds, watch how the agents engage—negotiating, counter-arguing, or even persuading. Does Agent A use logic, reassurance, or persuasion tactics? Does Agent B remain doubtful or eventually concede?”
― Pascal Bornet, Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life

“We remember the excitement in the AI community when these elements finally came together in the 2010s. It was like watching the first flight of the Wright brothers—suddenly, something that seemed impossible became reality. Systems could recognize images, understand speech, and process language with unprecedented accuracy.”
― Pascal Bornet, Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life

“Just as the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) defines six levels of driving automation, from Level 0 (fully manual) to Level 5 (fully autonomous under all conditions), we can apply a similar progression path to AI agents.”
― Pascal Bornet, Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life

“Another common issue is the lack of interdisciplinarity in the transformation. In our experience, the highest impact is the result of multi-lever end-to-end process automation – not small, siloed implementations, focused on one single technology lever. To achieve this, management should advocate for getting the right talents from across the different parts of an organization to work together (e.g., data scientists, developers, business analysts). Interdisciplinarity is also about avoiding limiting the transformation to the implementation of one single technology lever (e.g., RPA), and about implementing IA on end-to-end processes instead of only a few process tasks. By combining talents and technology levers and targeting end-to-end processes, the organization will create synergies, build economies of scale, and remove potential bottlenecks. Organizations failing to achieve this are not able to scale their IA transformation.”
― Pascal Bornet, INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human