From managed services to agentic services: Why this shift is real and why it’s happening now

A recent post from Sequoia Capital’s Julien Bek is gaining attention — and for good reason. It captures a shift many of us inside large services organizations have been feeling for some time: the line between software and services is collapsing.

Bek’s framing is sharp. He distinguishes between two business models: copilots, which sell AI tools to professionals who use them to do their jobs better, and autopilots, which sell outcomes directly to the end customer, bypassing the professional entirely. In markets where companies spend far more on work than on software, AI is rapidly turning that work into something that looks and behaves like a software business.

Box CEO Aaron Levie, in a post about the future of enterprise software, made a similar observation: incumbents that take too long to transform their workflows risk being disrupted, but those willing to do it to themselves first have a rare opportunity to lead.

We agree with that framing.

And at DXC, that’s exactly the posture we’re taking.

Managed services have always been about outcomes, giving customers confidence that their critical systems are resilient, secure and compliant — and that they will just work.

What’s changing is not what clients want, but how those outcomes can now be delivered.

Agentic systems fundamentally alter the delivery model by:

• Shifting work from manual execution to autonomous action

• Embedding intelligence in the service itself

• Elevating human expertise from doing the routine work to setting intent, supervising decisions and handling exceptions

• Beginning to scale services with the properties of software — speed, repeatability, consistency

In this world, “managed services” don’t disappear. They evolve.

This isn’t just about automating tasks. The real shift happens when systems can understand context rather than follow rules, make decisions based on evolving signals instead of static playbooks and learn from prior outcomes. Equally important is knowing when not to act, recognizing when to pause and escalate to human oversight rather than push forward. All of this must operate safely inside production environments, with strong guardrails that enterprise customers demand.

That’s the difference between traditional automation and agentic services.

It’s also where many early experiments fall down. Moving from a working demo to something that can operate continuously, securely and reliably inside a customer’s environment is a much bigger leap than it appears.

Looking ahead, the direction we’re taking at DXC is shaped by a few clear beliefs:

• The product is outcomes, not tools. The buyer doesn’t want another dashboard — they want the work handled.

• Context matters as much as intelligence. Autonomous systems are only useful if they understand the environment they’re operating in.

• Human judgment moves up the stack. Humans remain essential in supervisory, governance and decision-shaping roles.

• Production reality is the real test. Reliability, drift, security and resilience matter more than clever demos.

• Enterprise trust is non-negotiable. Autonomy without control is a liability, not a feature

These principles are shaping how we think about next generation services that behave more like software but are designed from day one to operate in complex, regulated and mission critical environments.

Startups will move fast, and they should. But incumbents that choose to lead their own disruption bring something uniquely powerful to this transition. They have deep operational knowledge and decades of real-world production data that no startup can replicate overnight. They have mature governance and security practices, as well as customer relationships built on years of trust. And they have hard-won experience operating at scale when things go wrong.

Perhaps most importantly, incumbents have deep industry expertise and an intimate understanding of how their customers' businesses simply work to help them grow in the years ahead.

The risk is trying to protect legacy delivery models for too long. The opportunity is using those strengths to build what comes next. 

The infrastructure that keeps enterprises running has always mattered. What's different now is that it's become the foundation on which agentic services get built. Work that was once overlooked is now where the most consequential transformation is taking place, and for those who already own that foundation, the opportunity is significant.

At DXC, that's exactly where we're focused. We see agentic services as a cleaner swap and a fundamentally better way to deliver the outcomes our customers already expect, without changing who the buyer is or what they care about. Making that real at enterprise scale requires more than intelligence; it requires context, reliability and operational trust. Those are the foundations we're investing in.

We are building for this future, deliberately, responsibly and with ambition.