IBM and Manulife tech executives foresee the rise in agentic artificial intelligence—systems that can think and act on their own. And that’s just one AI trend to keep an eye on, said Manav Gupta, IBM’s chief technology officer in Canada, and Jodie Wallis, Manulife’s chief analytics officer, in a panel session with The Logic Wednesday. (The Logic)

Talking point: Gupta said agentic AI is the “number 1” trend to look out for in the next 12 to 18 months. That’s followed by multimodal models, which take in different forms of content, like video and audio, to produce outputs. Gupta highlighted the promise of models that use math to organize data, while Wallis stressed the need for energy-efficient, low-consumption AI. Both executives agreed that “chain of thought”—AI that mimics human logical reasoning —is in its early stages but has growth potential. Gupta said IBM’s technology has saved it $3 billion this year. Meanwhile, Manulife employees using generative AI have seen a 12 per cent boost in sales conversions.