Agentic AI is one of the most talked-about topics in enterprise technology right now, but according to Peter van der Putten, most organizations are approaching it the wrong way.
In this conversation with CX Today’s Rhys Fisher, Peter van der Putten, Director of the AI Lab and Lead Scientist at Pegasystems, explains the thinking behind the company’s newly launched Customer Engagement Studio, a governed agentic workspace designed to take enterprise marketers from brief to live, personalized campaign in minutes.
Built as a layer on top of Customer Decision Hub, the solution coordinates specialized agents across marketing strategy, creative, data science, compliance, and performance through a single conversational interface.
Van der Putten uses Wells Fargo, one of Pega’s flagship customers, to illustrate the scale of what’s possible: six billion next best action decisions every month, across every channel, in under 250 milliseconds. The bottleneck, he argues, was never the decisioning engine. It was feeding it with enough content and actions.
The conversation also takes in Gartner’s prediction that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled, something van der Putten puts down to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the technology can do:
“People have maybe some magical thinking that you just throw an AI model at a problem and it will sort itself out. But that’s not going to work.”
Finally, the pair discuss Pega’s move toward outcome-based pricing, charging customers on business results rather than token consumption, a shift van der Putten describes as a direct response to an industry rethinking its AI cost models.
