Executive Summary
Key Takeaways
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are autonomous software entities that perceive context, reason about objectives and execute actions across enterprise systems and workflows. Advances in generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) have expanded agent capabilities, enabling them to retrieve knowledge, interpret inputs and orchestrate actions across applications. As enterprises embed agentic capabilities into platforms and processes, adoption increasingly depends on governance, security and interoperability with existing systems and data environments.
Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for AI Agents evaluates 32 software providers offering products supporting the design, orchestration and governance of autonomous AI agents across enterprise workflows and systems. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as Oracle, Databricks and AWS. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. Automation Anywhere, AWS, Boomi, Databricks, Dataiku, Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Teradata and UiPath were rated as Exemplary, with Alibaba Cloud, Snowflake and Tencent Cloud rated as Innovative. Cloudera, Couchbase, Domo, Huawei Cloud and NVIDIA were rated as Assurance; and Anthropic, C3 AI, DataRobot, EDB, EdgeVerve, Fractal, MathWorks, OpenAI, Palantir, SAS and Weights & Biases were rated as Merit.
Product Experience
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (40%) and Platform (40%), which includes adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. Oracle, Databricks and AWS achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by broad enterprise AI agent capabilities across agent design, model orchestration and lifecycle management and strong underlying platform governance, scalability and integration across enterprise environments. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities supporting deployment and operation across diverse enterprise roles and agent-driven operational contexts.
Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. AWS, IBM and Oracle were the Leaders in this category, showing strong customer advocacy and clear investment in success outcomes. Providers with lower performance often lacked publicly available customer validation or failed to demonstrate structured ROI measurement and proactive lifecycle engagement.
Strategic Recommendations
Prioritize AI agent platforms that combine autonomous decision-making with strong governance, security and observability controls. Ensure agents integrate with enterprise data infrastructure and existing applications to support coordinated workflows. Focus deployments on high-impact processes where autonomous reasoning can improve operational efficiency.
The Findings
The software providers and products evaluated in this research offer product and customer experiences, but not every feature is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to support the relevant business processes and use cases. Moreover, having too many product capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities is important and meets your enterprise’s requirements.
An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes in line with TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is evident throughout the provider’s website, the buying process and the customer journey.
Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories
The research finds Oracle atop the list, followed by Databricks and AWS. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. AWS and Oracle have done so in five categories; Databricks in three; and IBM and Microsoft in one category.
The quadrant chart below presents ratings for Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x- and y-axes, respectively, to visually classify software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience has above-median weighted performance on the axis, in aggregate across the two product categories, place farther to the right. The performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determine placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.
The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. Placement represents the software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements of product and customer experience.
Exemplary: This rating (upper right) applies to those providers that performed above the median on Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Automation Anywhere, AWS, Boomi, Databricks, Dataiku, Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Teradata and UiPath.
Innovative: This rating (lower right) applies to those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Alibaba Cloud, Snowflake and Tencent Cloud.
Assurance: This rating (upper left) applies to those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Cloudera, Couchbase, Domo, Huawei Cloud and NVIDIA.
Merit: This rating (lower left) applies to those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: Anthropic, C3 AI, DataRobot, EDB, EdgeVerve, Fractal, MathWorks, OpenAI, Palantir, SAS and Weights & Biases.
We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations, recognizing that ratings or rankings do not solely represent a provider’s value nor indicate universal suitability of a set of products.
