Chasing AGI misses the point - here's where the real potential lies
Thomas Van Duüren
Monday 25 August 2025
Most conversations about AI these days seem to circle back to one big question: Will machines ever think like humans?
That’s the promise of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and it makes for great headlines. But for most organisations, that debate is more of a distraction than a real opportunity.
The real breakthrough won’t come from building a machine that debates philosophy. It will come from something far more grounded: Enterprise General Intelligence (EGI).
Why businesses are the perfect ground for intelligence
Enterprises aren’t free of chaos. Anyone who’s dealt with scattered data, legacy systems or siloed departments knows how messy they can be.
But compared to the unpredictability of the outside world, they still offer a big advantage: rules, processes and defined systems. HR records follow a certain structure. Supply chains, however complex, operate within known boundaries. Financial software encodes compliance by design.
This mix of structure and complexity creates the perfect testing ground for a new kind of intelligence, one that can navigate the mess while also taking advantage of the order that’s already there.
What Enterprise General Intelligence means in practice
EGI is about AI agents that don't just analyse but act. Systems that can:
Spot a supply chain issue and reroute shipments automatically.
Track changing regulations and update compliance records.
Notice a missing link between systems and create the connection themselves.
The point isn’t to mimic human thought. It’s to create autonomous agents that handle complex enterprise problems on their own, reliably and transparently.
The key ingredients
For AI to reach this level inside businesses, a few things are essential:
- Breaking down big goals into clear, actionable steps.
- Staying aware of the whole system, not just one part of it.
- Taking actions across different tools and platforms and checking they worked.
- Relying on clean data and APIs so everything is trackable and auditable.
- Making connections across departments that don’t usually talk to each other.
- Learning continuously from outcomes and feedback.
The bigger picture
Do companies really need AI that paints pictures or passes a Turing test? Or do they need agents that notice a bottleneck, fix it and learn how to prevent it next time?
The fascination with AGI makes for great headlines. But the real transformation is already within reach, inside enterprises, where systems are structured, goals are clear and the impact is immediate.
That’s where the next decade of AI progress will truly matter.
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