NEC Laboratories America

Agentic AI for Enterprise Work | Projects

Organizations run on procedures that have already been written down: a policy document, an onboarding checklist, an email explaining a business process. The knowledge of what to do already exists in plain language, and an employee who reads it can understand what needs to happen. What is missing is a way to act on those instructions directly. Today, executing a written process still requires either a person working through each step or a developer building custom automation that can be costly to maintain and brittle when the process changes.

Large language models have closed the first half of this gap: AI can now read natural-language instructions and understand what needs to be done. The commercial opportunity is to close the second half, which is turning that understanding into reliable action.

This is reshaping the workflow automation market.

Agentic AI for Enterprise Work

Keyword Tag: enterprise agentic ai

Instead of relying on scarce engineering resources to automate each process, business users will be able to create and adapt agents themselves. That fundamentally changes the economics of enterprise automation and dramatically expands the range of work that can be automated.

We are building toward an enterprise where a non-technical user simply describes the outcome they want. AI agents then plan the work, select and use the right tools and internal systems, draw on the organization’s knowledge and people, and execute reliably at production scale. The result is a powerful shift: the natural-language description of a workflow becomes the workflow itself.

The barrier is no longer capability. It is reliability. And reliability breaks down at two levels that are often treated separately: reasoning and systems. At the reasoning level, an LLM can produce a plausible plan but drift during execution. It may invent steps, skip important preconditions, or choose the wrong tool from a catalog of hundreds with similar descriptions. These mistakes may be acceptable in a chat assistant. They are not acceptable in a business process involving money, sensitive data, or compliance.

At the systems level, agents create different challenges. Their execution generates bursty, unpredictable sequences of function calls, with cost and latency patterns that traditional schedulers were not designed to handle. An agent fleet that works well in a demo can quickly become too expensive or too slow at production scale.

Our approach addresses both problems. We make execution trustworthy by constraining the model rather than simply asking it to reason better. RunAgent interprets natural-language plans within explicit constraints that define what execution can and cannot do. TacTool treats tool selection as a reasoning problem, helping agents choose the right action rather than simply matching against a catalog. XPF brings these capabilities together behind a natural-language authoring interface, allowing users to create agents that execute real business workflows. SlideCraft and TalentScout ground those agents in the artifacts, knowledge, and tacit expertise that organizations already possess. Bifröst addresses the other half of the problem: making agent execution efficient at scale. It treats function invocation as a distributed-systems challenge, using peer-to-peer load balancing to manage the unpredictable workloads generated by fleets of agents.

Our AI systems address the two requirements for enterprise agentic AI: agents must execute correctly, and they must do so reliably and economically at scale.

Read Related Publications

RunAgent: Interpreting Natural-Language Plans with Constraint-Guided Execution (IEEE)

Humans solve problems by executing targeted plans, yet large language models (LLMs) remain unreliable for structured workflow execution. We propose RunAgent, a multiagent plan execution platform that interprets natural-language plans while enforcing stepwise execution through constraints and rubrics.

TacTool: Tactical Tool usage in Agentic AI Systems

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming the centerpiece in the design and deployment of Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems. AI agents typically have (a) reasoning ability to analyze and think through the given task, (b) context/memory to remember things in the short-term and long-term, and

SlideCraft: Context-aware Slides Generation Agent

Creating effective slide presentations requires adapting both content and structure to match the communication context e.g. whether the presentation is for summarizing to executives, or reporting progress to research supervisors. In research and enterprise environments, this need for context-sensitive

TalentScout: Multimodal AI-Driven Expert Finding in Organizations

Identifying subject-matter experts within organizations remains a challenging task due to the scale, heterogeneity, and unstructured nature of enterprise knowledge assets. We present TalentScout, an AI-driven expert identification system that constructs a unified, skill-centric knowledge graph by ingesting

Bifröst: Peer-to-peer Load-balancing for Function Execution in Agentic AI Systems

Agentic AI systems rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) to execute complex tasks by invoking external functions. The efficiency of these systems depends on how well function execution is managed, especially under heterogeneous and high-variance workloads, where function execution times can range from

XPF: Agentic AI System for Business Workflow Automation

In this paper, we propose a novel agentic AI system called XPF, which enables users to create “agents” using just natural language, where each agent is capable of executing complex, real-world business workflows in an accurate and reliable manner. XPF provides an interface to develop and iterate over