Executive summary
The EMEA tour with Ahmed Bashir marked a pivotal moment for enterprise AI, shifting the conversation from simple assistants to fully autonomous, agentic systems that act and decide alongside business leaders. By engaging stakeholders across functions and emphasizing governance, integration, and real-world use cases, Ahmed demonstrated how unified, conversational AI can break down silos and drive true business transformation. The key takeaway: organizations must move quickly to embrace agentic AI, invest in foundational capabilities, and foster a culture of experimentation to stay ahead in the next wave of intelligent enterprise.
Bold mission
When Ahmed Bashir landed in the EMEA region earlier this month, the journey was far more than a series of boardroom meetings and keynote speeches. It was a bold mission: to galvanize enterprise leaders around a new paradigm of AI, one that moves beyond assistants and chatbots toward fully autonomous systems. In the halls of finance firms, across digital transformation offices, and in innovation labs, Ahmed’s presence lit up conversations and minds with undeniably inspiring stories.
As CTO, he explained our industry is on the brink of a fundamental shift. For years, enterprise software has lagged behind consumer tech, weighed down by outdated interfaces and siloed workflows. But with the rise of conversational AI and large language models, we’re entering a new era, one where computers can understand, reason, and act on natural language, transforming them from passive tools into true business partners.
Ahmed’s EMEA trip came at this inflection point. His mandate: to help enterprises embrace a mindset of “AI with agency,” while navigating governance, integration, trust, and organizational readiness. The vision is to harness autonomous agents, digital counterparts that mirror human roles, equipped with memory and skills, and connected to a unified, real-time knowledge graph. This integration breaks down organizational silos, enabling smarter collaboration and decision-making across the business.
For IT executives, the stakes are high. The move from augmentative AI (assistants, copilots) to agentic systems opens possibilities and risks. To realize this, we’re blending traditional and AI-native computing, supported by advanced data architectures like graph databases and vector stores. This foundation powers semantic search, real-time analytics, and actionable insights at scale.
Ahmed’s approach was to champion early dialogue with business leaders, CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, CPOs, heads of marketing, operations, compliance, CFOs, and even legal, before diving into technical architecture. The message: AI agents don’t live in a vacuum; they must align with value streams and constraints right from day one, integrated!
Personalization is key: agents and workflows should be tailored to each team’s needs, ensuring the right capabilities are always accessible. Most importantly, this approach brings our customers closer to our product teams, fostering true team intelligence and making our organization more agile and connected.
Across multiple stops, Ahmed spotlighted early agentic use cases: autonomous process orchestration, contextual decision agents in customer service or finance, and AI agents embedded in domain workflows. Hearing real stories from Ibanxs and Revaine helped bridge the gap between abstract AI topics and business relevance.
One of the deeper lessons: ecosystems matter. Ahmed connected with local AI startups, system integrators, enterprise innovation hubs, and research groups. He held roundtables in cities across EMEA, bridging global vision with regional nuance, data regulations, market maturity, talent constraints. Ultimately, we’re moving beyond simply commanding computers as we’re reasoning with them as peers. This shift will make complex decisions more accessible, accelerate innovation, and empower every team to reach new heights.
Many people he met during the trip emphasize a recurring theme: “AI leadership + data strategy + trust.” Ahmed made clear that advancing agentic systems without a governance foundation is courting disaster. From policy guardrails, auditability, human override, to ethical boundaries—these must be embedded from the start.
Perhaps most importantly, the trip was narrative-rich. Ahmed’s talks often circled back to stories of transformation, disruption, and urgency. He challenged IT leaders to break free from inertia, to stop “piloting around the edges,” and to lean into AI as a core strategic capability.
Key takeaways & guidance for IT leaders
Here’s what informed IT executives could carry forward from Ahmed Bashir’s EMEA journey:
- Start with value, then build the agent. Don’t begin with agentic AI for the sake of novelty. Identify high‑impact domains where autonomous decisioning can reduce friction, cost, or time. Use those to pilot and scale. The tech architecture, agent orchestration, context modeling, and feedback loops should follow the business need, not lead it.
- Design for collaboration, oversight, and fail‑safe. An agentic system must always coexist with human actors. Design architectures that embed human-in-the-loop checkpoints, override mechanisms, and traceable audits. Embrace “governance by design,” not as an afterthought.
- Break organizational silos. Agentic systems span domains: data infrastructure, integration, workflow, UX, legal, risk. IT leaders need to convene cross-functional teams early. Ahmed’s traveling roundtables in EMEA repeatedly showed that breakthroughs come when diverse stakeholders co-own the transformation.
- Embrace incremental autonomy. Don’t expect overnight autonomy everywhere. A pattern of “assist → guide → act” can help build confidence. Progressive levels of autonomy allow systems—and the people who use them—to adapt.
- Invest in foundational capabilities. Behind every agent lies a robust stack: unified data models, observability, context memory, orchestration, fallback strategies, permission-aware access to data, etc. As you evolve, some of your biggest investments may come in these enablers, not in the agent logic itself.
- Cultivate a culture of experimentation. Risk aversion kills innovation. Ahmed’s presence in EMEA amplified this: encourage your teams to fail fast, learn, iterate. A mindset shift is often the hardest part—from “safe/managed pilots” to “transformational bets.”
A call to action for IT executives
Ahmed Bashir’s EMEA tour wasn’t a passive lecture, it was a provocation. It’s an invitation for you, as a technology leader, to rethink your AI posture before the next wave makes it imperative.
- Host an internal AI agent workshop; bring business, legal, ops, and technology leads together to ideate agentic use cases.
- Run a “governance sprint”; define safety, override, monitoring, and audit policies before building.
- Choose one domain to pilot, not for prestige, but for tangible ROI.
- Build bridges to your ecosystem startups, academic labs, regional AI hubs and test agentic patterns in your local context.
Because the future is arriving fast. And in that future, agents don’t simply suggest, they decide, act, and iterate. Will your organization be ready? Can you trust technology to support you?
The answers are given; Yes…. DevRev and its partner ecosystem are ready to help you in this journey.
