Agentic AI: The 2026 Reality Check

Agentic AI is forcing enterprises to rethink enterprise search, RAG, and AI strategy. In this conversation, Forrester Principal Analyst Rowan Kern joins us to unpack what's actually happening inside enterprise AI platforms today, and where most agentic AI initiatives are quietly stalling out. Rowan breaks down Forrester's Cognitive Search Platforms Wave and the buying criteria enterprises should weigh before investing: data connectors, chunking and embedding strategy, and hybrid search that blends lexical search, vector search, and knowledge graphs. We discuss why building your own RAG pipeline is harder than it looks, how enterprise search is evolving beyond information retrieval into full agentic execution, why "agent spaghetti" is becoming a real AI governance risk, and what a single pane of glass for monitoring AI agents needs to include. We also cover how enterprises are proving AI ROI, not with generic copilots handed to everyone, but with clearly measured use cases in service and support, plus a portfolio approach where one successful AI agent funds the next. Rowan closes with a practical checklist for any enterprise AI leader planning agentic AI investments in 2026: data readiness, evaluation and testing, internal tech landscape, and vendor interoperability through MCP and A2A. Whether you're building an AI governance framework, evaluating AI platforms, or separating real large language models and agentic AI progress from the hype, this episode breaks it down with data, not buzzwords. #ai #artificialintelligence #enterpriseai #enterprisetechnology #podcast #aipodcast #aiagents #agenticai #generativeai #rag #agenticrag #kore_ai