Druid AI CEO on Agentic AI Future, Enterprise Best Practices

Enterprise AI adoption remains a focus for business leaders and channel partners alike. We spoke with Joe Kim, CEO of Druid AI, about what he’s seen work for enterprise leaders and what they need to keep top of mind in 2026.

Why enterprise agentic AI use cases are becoming more tangible

Druid AI serves enterprise customers across a variety of industries, including healthcare, retail, and more. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he says in many cases, boards and senior leaders are still jumping into AI at any cost.

“There’s a lot of top-down pressure that’s happening across the board for sure,” Kim said, noting that companies across all industries seem to know they should implement AI even if they don’t know entirely how or in what ways.

Within healthcare and retail, as two examples, Kim says the emergence of agentic AI is showing companies the power of the technology. 

From handling scheduling and administrative tasks end-to-end to automating internal workflows to scale outcomes, Kim thinks the tangible value of agentic AI is becoming clearer to many.

Why most enterprise AI projects fail—and how leaders can beat the odds

As we’ve covered previously, the ROI companies see from their early AI investments has been varied, with many reporting disappointment in what they’ve seen as a result of the new technology.

Kim says this is due to several factors, but ultimately, he wants to see more leaders determine clearer expectations for their technology deployments before they begin implementation.

“More than anything, the ROI portion needs to happen faster this year,” Kim said. “You need to calculate and understand what it is you would like to do first and not deviate from it.”

Kim says he and his colleagues at Druid spent part of last year talking with its partners and customers about joining what it calls “the five percent club,” a reference to the 2025 MIT report that stated nearly 95 percent of GenAI pilot projects had failed.

To get to the “other five percent,” that is, those who view their AI investments as successful, Kim highlights the need to deeply understand business objectives before buying a solution.

“It comes down to what is going to drive value for the business, and whether AI is going to be the technology we need to get there,” Kim added.

To Kim, the potential of AI, especially as agentic AI comes to market, means it will be able to address most challenges. Still, he says, leaders need to be specific about how they will leverage AI to address certain needs and then determine measurable outcomes they want to achieve.

Where Druid fits into a crowded market

Druid says its platform unifies agentic AI orchestration, secure integrations, workspaces, knowledge, and workflow automation so agents can reason, decide, and act across internal systems, safely and at scale.

The company recently earned $31 million in Series C funding and was recognized by Gartner for its conversational AI platform capabilities. 

As Kim notes, though, the company has been focused on AI development long before most businesses began seeking it out a few years ago.

“Because we’ve been building this stuff for such a long time, we just are a little further ahead than others, though of course the pace of innovation right now is so fast,” Kim said.

Buy vs. build: Why partnerships matter for enterprise AI agents

Druid’s most recent offering is an AI agent marketplace that it says gives businesses a way to purchase and deploy production-ready agents from trusted sources.

The marketplace approach reflects what many seem to be realizing after two or three years of AI experimentation: building everything yourself is costly and time-intensive, and most don’t have the resources to do so at the scale required to meet expectations.

“Innovation is super rapid, and the tech is constantly evolving. Because it’s all moving so fast, trying to build everything yourself is very difficult,” Kim said. 

Druid works with partners and its enterprise customers on a variety of needs, and Kim says he thinks partnerships are more important than ever for successfully adopting AI. 

He wants business leaders to reflect on what they need from MSPs, SIs, and other partners, as well as from technology partners like Druid, to run their businesses.

“Make sure you are partnering with the right people for what you need. Have these partners who want to help you actually managed integrations before? Do they have experience in bringing successful AI projects forward? Those are important questions to ask.”