Insight & Analysis | Technology & Business Solutions (TABS)

Agentic AI at Scale

July 25, 2025

How Digital Employees Are Reinventing Operations Across THL’s Portfolio

Key Takeaways:

AI is evolving from reactive assistants to proactive agents—capable of planning, executing, and adapting multi-step tasks with minimal human input.
At THL’s GenAI Innovation Day, portfolio companies demonstrated how agentic AI is already reshaping employee workflows regardless of technical expertise.
Looking ahead, agentic AI is poised to transform how work gets done across functions and successful implementations include intentional design, clear success metrics, and ecosystems that support governance and orchestration.

We interact with AI constantly—often without realizing it. Our most-used apps are powered by it. Email apps suggest replies, flag urgent messages, and remind us to follow-up on unanswered threads. Social media platforms personalize feeds to keep us engaged. Digital maps predict traffic and reroute us in real time.

These systems are extremely helpful. They enhance our experiences by anticipating what we might want or need next. They’re also reactive.

What if your customer service platform could not only triage tickets but proactively resolve them by querying internal systems and summarizing documentation? What if your supply chain dashboard could simulate disruptions, recommend vendor swaps, and trigger contract workflows in real time? Or if your revenue operations suite could identify churn risks, personalize outreach, and optimize pricing—all autonomously?

This is the potential of agentic AI—systems that don’t just assist, but act. The next phase of the AI revolution, agentic AI refers to autonomous agents that can plan, execute, and adapt multi-step tasks on your behalf and with minimal human guidance. These systems have the ability to chain together and execute multiple prompts, data sources, and tools to accomplish long, often complex workflows. Engineering the appropriate context and action are key.

Companies are building on the success of copilots and chatbots to see how agentic AI can drive further operational gains.

“Agentic AI is an evolution of how work gets done,” said Mark Benaquista, Managing Director, THL. “We’re seeing companies across our portfolio incorporating it into their workflows to drive innovation, expand margins, and scale operations in entirely new ways.”

To understand how this shift is unfolding in real time, we turn to several organizations that presented at THL’s Gen AI Innovation Day—from operational leaders like Centria Health and Ashling Partners to startups like Crew AI and Clay. Their stories offer practical insight into what agentic AI looks like in action and where it’s headed.

Centria Health: Agents that Listen, Learn and Act

Centria, a leading provider of Applied Behavioral Analysis services to children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

Centria is pioneering the use of agentic AI in healthcare operations—particularly in high-volume, low-margin areas like recruiting and credentialing. Led by CIO Pawanjit Singh, the team launched a conversational AI agent that handles candidate screenings via voice, answers questions in real time, manages scheduling, and sends summaries to recruiters. Built in just four days using Google’s Gemini, the agent substantially reduces recruiting costs and has already transformed how the company handles frontline hiring.

Centria measures success not just in financial terms, but in clinical outcomes. Recruiting ABA technicians is slow and challenging—so the company deployed an AI agent that acts as both an informed, empathetic recruiter and a high-efficiency screener. By accelerating the hiring process, the tool helps match qualified staff to centers faster—so more children and families get access to critical therapy.

During his presentation, Singh explained how the team took the success of their voice AI recruiting tool and adapted the same underlying technology to new uses cases, like coaching and training employees. Inspired by the building block structure of the technology, Centria has also built agents for document reviews, scheduling optimization, clinical summarization, and more.

“Think of AI agents as nothing but digital employees who are experts in doing one specific task,” said Singh. “You could have hundreds and thousands of them within your organization and create your own internal marketplace of them for whatever you need to work more efficiently.”

Centria’s approach demonstrates how agentic AI can take root outside traditional software companies—particularly when grounded in real operational needs.

Ashling Partners: Architecting the Agentic Ecosystem

Ashling Partners: a technology firm that specializes in building and scaling intelligent automation programs and centers of excellence for the Global 2000.

As AI tools become more embedded in operations—especially AI agents—questions arise around system architecture and process organization.

“The big piece we try to take away is what do we need agents to do and how do you orchestrate that,” said Zachary Coles, Managing Director, Ashling Partners. “How do you make that a little bit more streamlined through your organization? If you have to have agents calling agents, you have to have agents invoking on the processes, reach out to what we call the tool sets they have at their disposal. How do we use that to the best of our ability to drive outcomes and drive them quickly?”

Ashling employs a framework known as the “Four A’s”: Advisory, Automation, Applied AI, and Analytics. Their goal is to design ecosystems where agents aren’t just performing tasks, but informing decisions, adjusting based on outcomes, and integrating tightly into enterprise systems. In his presentation, Coles described solutions that combine process orchestration, human-in-the-loop oversight, and scalable architecture. For example, a custom AI solution built for a Fortune 200 Energy & Utilities company streamlined ARP injection response—generating measurable efficiency gains and significant new revenue—and included a flexible trust and verify process. One that he encourages as part of every AI strategy.

“Individuals want to see what is happening, what data are they producing, what are they taking out of this,” said Coles. “This helps make sure that data is accurate, the people understand what they’re getting as an output, and then they can go back and submit that if they want to for further refinement or they can proceed through the process.”

Looking Ahead

To explore the frontier of agentic AI, THL invited two emerging players to Innovation Day: Crew AI and Clay.

Crew AI has built an open-source platform that enables developers to compose, test, and deploy agents quickly; they currently service over 60 million agents monthly. Clay is a data marketplace that lets go-to-market teams run agentic processes at scale—combining over 100 data sources to automate key GTM workflows. The presenters from Crew AI and Clay—separately touched on key trends and best practices as it relates to agentic AI.

Crew highlighted how agentic AI is rapidly evolving from isolated experiments to structured, enterprise-grade deployments—driven by a surge in open-source development and growing demand for governance. Clay echoed this shift from experimentation to scale, emphasizing that non-technical teams like rev ops and sales ops are now leading adoption. Together, the two presentations reflect a broader trend: agentic AI will become a necessity. And effective implementation demands intentionality. In other words, invest time planning each agent use case; don’t give multiple use cases to one agent; have a clear definition of what success looks like; and track performance against your success criteria.

“As with every advancement in AI, agents will require ongoing investment in governance, orchestration tools, and human controls—but the benefits are compelling,” said Alex Sabel, Vice President, THL. “Faster decision-making, scalable operations, more agile workforces. We’re already seeing this across the portfolio, and we believe agentic AI will be a major driver of productivity-especially in the middle market.”

To learn more about how agentic AI is impacting THL and its portfolio companies, visit www.THL.com or contact our team today.

About GenAI Innovation Day 2025

In June 2025, THL—together with AWS—hosted its first-ever GenAI Innovation Day at AWS’s Boston office, bringing together nearly 50 product, technology, and AI leaders from across the portfolio. The day-long event was part of THL’s broader push to foster collaboration and knowledge-sharing around AI implementation. It serves as a hands-on complement to the firm’s quarterly AI roundtables. To learn about other topics discussed at Innovation Day, read “The AI Copilot Culture” and “What It Takes to Scale AI.”

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Mark Benaquista, Managing Director, SRG
mbenaquista@thl.com

Jagjit Singh, Director, SRG
jsingh@thl.com

Alex Sabel, Vice President
asabel@thl.com