The Growing Importance of XLAs in the Age of Agentic AI

Description

This IDC Market Perspective highlights the growing importance of experience-level agreements (XLAs) in the age of agentic AI. Experience-level agreements are emerging as the blueprint for human-AI collaboration - shifting performance measurement beyond static service metrics to dynamic, context-aware insights that reflect both technical success and human impact. The next generation of XLAs will go further, blending short-term efficiency with long-term resilience by embedding creativity, experience risk, and agentic intelligence directly into the fabric of work contracts."XLAs are evolving from human-first IT metrics into the strategic North Star of AI-enabled work, ensuring that as agents measure, predict, and automate, they amplify - not erode - human creativity and innovation at the heart of the future of work." - Meike Escherich, associate director, AI-Enabled Future of Work, IDC

Product Code: US54416426

Executive Snapshot

Key takeaways
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New Market Developments and Dynamics

When service-level agreements ruled, and artificial intelligence was a sideshow
Today AI-enabled XLAs act as human potential
- With agentic AI, XLAs become context aware and instantly responsive
- Human creativity becomes a measurable outcome
- Governance shifts from "keeping the lights on" to "enabling human judgment"
Constructing tomorrow's experience operating system
- Calibrate experience capital and experience debt
- Include experience-risk and creativity indices
- Move agentic experience management from insight to orchestration
- Write contracts that reward innovation, not just efficiency