Alex Holt, the field chief technology officer at AI voice startup ElevenLabs, is about as bullish on AI agents as any executive in the C-suite can be. The company has already embedded autonomous agents into sales, recruiting, and internal operations—and Holt believes the efficiency gains achieved so far are only the beginning.

ElevenLabs has deployed an inbound sales development representative (SDR) agent that has handled more than 3,000 customer leads this year, qualifying over 90% of those prospective clients in 32 different languages without any human intervention. Another AI agent serves as a coach that helps new sales team members role-play customer interactions, resulting in faster onboarding for that part of the workforce. A recruiting agent conducts first-round interviews with job candidates, and within the company's Slack, various agents are quick to jump in and answer employee questions about internal processes.

"I think what's most exciting about this space is that you know you always feel like you're on the tip of the iceberg," says Holt. The efficiency gains ElevenLabs is reaping from agentic AI—AI systems that can autonomously plan and execute multi-step tasks with minimal human oversight—may feel cutting edge today, he says, but "in six months time, you can see even more gains."

Holt's outlook mirrors a broader shift. CTOs and chief information officers increasingly have homed in on agentic AI as a central focus for the value they expect to extract from their substantial investments in the technology. Agentic AI's share of AI value grew from 17% in 2025 to 22% this year, according to research published by consulting giant BCG, and is projected to reach 39% by 2030. Yet most surveys find that businesses remain ill-prepared to rethink workflows and orchestrate multi-agent processes, in which one agent autonomously passes work along to another.

At ElevenLabs, most employees work collaboratively with agents, and a majority have built their own agents to help handle repetitive tasks. The company's core business objectives have not changed with AI: sales teams are expected to use it to generate more revenue at a faster pace, while customer service satisfaction scores are closely monitored.

"It's exactly the same business metrics," says Holt. "This has to be an initiative that the business units themselves are driving and pushing. The agents and tech are a tool that they can leverage to do that."

Organizationally, ElevenLabs has deployed an engineer to sit on every team across the business, and every group has fewer than 10 people—a structure that embeds technical capability directly within the business units Holt says should be driving these initiatives. Within recruiting, for example, two forward deployed engineers work in a pod with HR colleagues, with the sole objective of reducing the time it takes to get candidates through the interview process. Today, almost all prospective candidates are initially screened by an AI recruiter when applying for a role at ElevenLabs.

"That's 30 minutes that the recruiter can spend at the end of the process, convincing you to join," says Holt.

Holt joined ElevenLabs in September 2023 as an engineer after spending five years at software and data analytics company Palantir Technologies. He was elevated to the field CTO role in June 2026. Three months later, the startup announced that it had doubled its valuation to $22 billion. CEO Mati Staniszewski has recently indicated that ElevenLabs may begin to plan for an initial public offering in 2028.

For Holt, the next frontier for agentic AI is to put more effort into multi-agent systems, enabling greater shared context and more complex work handoffs between multiple agents. That work is already under development for the company's sales leads. The SDR agent uses voice AI to determine the seriousness of a prospective buyer, looping in a human representative after that screening process. But recently, one ElevenLabs customer was able to close a sale entirely through an interaction with two agents: the inbound request was first fielded by the SDR agent, and an account executive agent later handled the legal documents and contracts. That handoff—one agent autonomously passing work along to another—is the kind of multi-agent orchestration that most surveys find businesses ill-prepared to execute.

"The value of that is you can now automate that whole chain for customers where it's the simple, most repetitive mechanical cases," says Holt. That frees employees to dedicate more time to more complex inbound requests or upselling.

Embracing agentic AI at this magnitude does require some patience, Holt says. Is the recruiting agent helping to hire the right people? Are ElevenLabs' customer service scores improving with AI? "Some of these metrics can take a long time," he says. "We lean on the business owners to identify those leading indicators and the metrics we should be measuring."

There are also instances in which AI can act in unintended ways—an issue that has raised alarm following recent high-profile cases in which OpenAI and Anthropic agents went rogue. ElevenLabs says it has created a human-led monitoring and observation layer to govern its agents. But mistakes can still slip through: one customer service agent erroneously gave a small refund of under $30 to a customer and failed to escalate the issue to an employee. ElevenLabs created a test case that simulated the call and the exact chain of thought and reasoning that led the agent astray, then updated the prompts and guardrails.

Holt says tracking every decision an agent makes in this manner can actually be helpful. If a human made the same mistake, the company likely wouldn't have noticed.

"It's not just automating processes; it allows you to collect more data," says Holt of agentic AI. "I expect over the next few years, the trend that we're going to start seeing is people talking much more about optimizing these processes."

By John Kell

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.