On this episode of Scouting For Growth, Sabine VdL is joined by two powerhouse voices shaping the future of enterprise transformation: Ulrich (Uli) Homann, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, and Mark Luquire, EY Global Microsoft Alliance Co-innovation Leader. Together, they unpack a question every insurance and financial services executive is quietly asking right now: How do you build an agentic AI enterprise that doesn’t just move faster… but gets smarter — and works for everyone? From rigid automation to outcome-driven intelligence Uli and Mark draw a clear line between yesterday’s automation and today’s agentic AI reality. Traditional automation was task-driven and brittle: workflows had to follow a fixed sequence, and you needed to know that sequence in advance. If anything changed, the whole process broke or required manual intervention. Agentic AI flips that model. Instead of obsessing over steps, leaders can now focus on the outcome — and allow intelligent systems to help figure out how to get there, even when conditions shift mid-process. In other words, enterprises can begin to rethink not only how processes run… but which processes even need to exist. That’s not incremental change. That’s operational reinvention. What happens when everyone gets access? Mark shares a critical EY lesson: when EY gave broad access to generative AI across the organization early on, people didn’t just use it to speed up tasks. They used it as a thought-partner — a way to sharpen ideas, improve deliverables, and accelerate the quality of work. Productivity moved up. Confidence moved up. Curiosity moved up. And then the tech evolved again. Mark reflects on the rapid shift from early GenAI tools to today’s emerging agent capabilities — systems that can now write code, build applications, and take action with very little prompting. That evolution opens the door to a new enterprise reality: AI that doesn’t just assist… it executes. Or as the conversation makes crystal clear: It’s not just providing information anymore — it’s taking on work, processing decisions, and driving momentum. The leadership mindset shift: “start with where you want to be” One of the biggest takeaways from this episode is refreshingly simple—and extremely hard to do in practice: Focus on where you want to be… then rethink how you’re going to get there. That’s the key to unlocking agentic AI at scale. Because most organizations try to bolt AI onto existing workflows, legacy systems, and operating models. But agentic AI forces a different question: What if the old workflow is the problem? What if your best path forward is not optimization — but redesign? Why this matters for enterprise leaders (especially in insurance) For C-suite leaders, this episode is a strategic blueprint for what’s coming next: an enterprise where AI becomes a true digital workforce, operating alongside humans — amplifying expertise, reducing friction, and accelerating execution. But the goal isn’t speed for speed’s sake. It’s building intelligence that creates measurable business value and earns adoption across the organization — from the boardroom to the front line. Because the future won’t belong to companies that deploy the most AI tools. It will belong to the ones that build an agentic enterprise that’s trusted, scalable, and designed to work for people — not around them.