Organisations across Australia and New Zealand are poised to make a critical leap from isolated artificial intelligence pilots into stable, real-world business use cases.
Industry indicators identify 2026 as the definitive tipping point where the primary enterprise focus shifts to productionising autonomous, multi-step agentic workflows. To achieve true reliability at scale, businesses must navigate complex technical architectures, model token economics, and robust governance guardrails.
Key efficiency gains:
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We have signed a three-year strategic collaboration agreement with AWS to deepen our AI capabilities and accelerate customer solutions.
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Our team leverages a comprehensive talent pool of more than 500 AWS certifications across Mantel to develop agentic tools using Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q, and Amazon SageMaker.
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Prototyping can successfully get systems working 80% of the time, highlighting the vital need for our experience to achieve the remaining percentage required for true production reliability.
Engineering Reliability and Managing Token Economics in Production
Moving autonomous systems into core business operations requires an evolution in traditional development. Organisations must modernise legacy tools, optimise model latency, and manage token consumption costs to ensure the underlying economics stack up. Rather than pursuing speculative overhauls, forward-thinking enterprises are embedding an agentic coding style directly into their everyday greenfield builds and modernisations.
“By 2026, the primary focus will be on productionising agentic AI. It's quite easy to prototype and get something working, but the focus must be getting the reliability and consistency out of agentic systems. Token management is complex, and high costs can come with using more powerful models, so optimising token usage becomes important. Every single one of our projects now looks at using an agentic AI coding style, whether that's a greenfield build or tech modernisation. It's just embedded in the ways of working.”
Adam DurbinChief Technology Officer | Mantel
