Skip to content
Image Back to blog

Are Your AI Agents SAFE?

The AI agent revolution is here, promising to automate everything from customer service to complex decision-making. But hold your horses! Before you unleash these digital dynamos on your enterprise, there's a crucial question to ask: Are they SAFE?

Author
Mick Hollison

Alright, folks, let’s cut to the chase. The AI agent revolution is here, promising to automate everything from customer service to complex decision-making. But hold your horses! Before you unleash these digital dynamos on your enterprise, there’s a crucial question to ask: Are they SAFE?

I’m talking about S.A.F.E. agents. And at Sema4.ai, we’re not just helping businesses to build agents; we’ve built the first platform to produce secure, accurate, fast, and extensible agents at scale.

What does SAFE mean? Buckle up, because this is where it gets interesting:

  • S – secure and governed: In the Wild West of AI, security and governance are your six-shooters. You need agents that operate within your established rules, not rogue bots going off-script. This means agents that authenticate and operate securely on behalf of users. Sema4.ai agents also run safely inside your VPC.
  • A – accurate and explainable: Let’s be honest, no one wants an agent that’s fast but wrong, or precise but slower than molasses in January. Sema4.ai agents access data securely using audited and tested queries to ensure accuracy. And accuracy is awesome but if you don’t show your work you still fail the class. You need to understand why your agents are doing what they’re doing. Explainability builds trust and prevents catastrophic errors.
  • F – fast and easy: Time is money. You need agents that can be built and deployed quickly and managed without a PhD in computer science. “Fast and easy” isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity.
  • E – extensible and adaptable: Imagine your business apps and data sources are all separate islands. Sema4.ai agents build instant, high-speed bridges between them, making everything feel like one big, connected mainland. Our agents are like expert Swiss Army knives for your apps and data — they can connect to anything you’ve got and are flexible enough to handle whatever your business throws their way as it evolves.

Why SAFE matters (and why most agents aren’t)

Think of AI agents as employees. Would you hire someone you couldn’t trust, who made mistakes, took forever to do anything, and whose reasoning was a mystery? Probably not, right? So why would you tolerate that from your AI?

The truth is, many of the current agent offerings fall short on the SAFE scale. Let’s take a look:

  • Ecosystem vendors (Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow): These guys are the 800-pound gorillas of enterprise software. They’re adding agent capabilities to their existing suites, which sounds great in theory. But here’s the rub:
    • SAFE score:
      • Security and governance: Decent, leveraging existing platform security.
      • Accuracy and explainability: Mixed bag. Often tied to the limitations of their existing data silos. Agents are only as good as the data they can access and their reasoning may be behind closed doors.
      • Fast and easy: Integration can be a beast. Customization is often limited.
      • Extensible and adaptable: Often lacking, especially when agents venture outside of the core ecosystem.
    • Bottom line: They’re trying to bolt agent capabilities onto legacy systems. It’s like putting a rocket engine on a horse-drawn carriage. You might go faster, but it’s still a bumpy ride.
  • Purpose-built vendors (Sierra, 11x): These guys focus on specific use cases, like customer service or sales. They can be good at what they do, but:
    • SAFE score:
      • Security and governance: Variable. Depends on the vendor.
      • Accuracy and explainability: Can be high within their narrow focus. But try to use them for something else, and they fall apart.
      • Fast and easy: Deployment can be quick for the specific use case, but customization is limited. They dictate the business process requirements versus you defining them for yourself.
      • Extensible and adaptable: Again, variable. Often tied to the complexity of the use case. More importantly, these vendors define the workflows and processes for you, making them inherently less flexible.
    • Bottom line: They’re like giving someone a box of parts and saying, “Build a car!” Great for tinkerers. A nightmare for businesses that need predictable results now.
  • Developer frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI): These are the toolkits for building your own agents. They’re powerful, but:
    • SAFE score:
      • Security and governance: You’re on your own, kid. Security and governance are your responsibility.
      • Accuracy and explainability: Highly variable. Depends entirely on your coding skills, data, and LLM of choice.
      • Fast and easy: Fast? Are you kidding me? These are developer tools. “Easy” is not in their vocabulary.
      • Extensible and adaptable: Pretty solid on the extensibility front, but you need to bring the expertise to connect the dots.
    • Bottom line: They’re like giving someone a box of parts and saying, “Build a car!” Great for tinkerers. A nightmare for businesses that need predictable results now.

Sema4.ai Enterprise Edition: the SAFE choice

So, where does that leave you? With Sema4.ai, of course.

We’ve built the industry’s first SAFE enterprise AI platform, designed from the ground up to deliver trusted agents at scale.

  • Security and governance: We’re talking enterprise-grade security (ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR). Our platform gives you the controls to define guardrails and ensure compliance.
  • Accuracy and explainability: Our platform is designed to handle the messy, unstructured data that powers real-world businesses. We give agents the data and tools they need to be super accurate. We also show our work, just like that super smart kid in your algebra class.
  • Fast and easy: Sema4.ai empowers business users to build agents using natural language. If you can describe the problem, you can build the agent to solve it. We also offer Sai, an AI-powered guide, to streamline the entire process.
  • Extensible and adaptable: Sema4.ai agents are built for your world, not the other way around. They effortlessly tap into your entire data universe and workflows, ensuring they’re always in sync and can scale with your every business twist and turn.

Stop tinkering, start manufacturing

The era of one-off agent projects is over. You need a factory, not a garage. Sema4.ai provides the platform to build, manage, and deploy SAFE agents at scale, transforming your business and driving real results.

Don’t settle for unsafe, unreliable, or unexplainable AI. Choose SAFE. Choose Sema4.ai.

Visit www.sema4.ai to learn more.

Resources

Sema4.ai Launches Enterprise Edition: Industry’s First SAFE Enterprise AI Agent Platform

Enterprise AI Agents – The Business Apps of the Future

Revolutionize knowledge work through enterprise agents

Learn about Sema4.ai Agents

Read next
  • Thought leadership

Introducing Sema4.ai Enterprise Edition

  • Technical

SAFE, Meet FAIR

  • Thought leadership

Transforming Data into Action: Introducing Sema4.ai Team Edition for Snowflake