Bayer deploys agentic AI assistants Friday and Eli to thousands of users

Bayer is piloting an internal agentic AI system named Friday for 1,000 employees, with plans for a full rollout as a mobile app and web interface. The system handles non-mission-critical tasks such as email management, HR policy queries, and purchase requisitions, while expanding into mission-critical workspaces. Bayer reports that 80% of its workforce uses Microsoft Copilot 365, and its internal AI platform MyGenesis serves 25,000 monthly users. The company utilizes N8N for citizen development workflows under a hub-and-spoke model, providing a central golden image for security and governance. Bayer has launched an Agent-Hub to register all internal agents and an LLM-MCP-Gateway for secure access to language models and MCP services. The strategy aims for an API-led, headless, and composable architecture that provides 80% of the foundational capabilities to teams, leaving the final 20% of solution-specific development to autonomous squads. Jan Tönnesen argues that a well-defined core providing transparency, observability, and governance is essential to enable decentralized AI adoption without hindering speed. Separately, Bayer’s agentic AI sales assistant, Eli, has scaled from a small pilot to 1,200 users in the commercial and sales sector across eight countries. The system processes 17,000 queries per month, allowing sales teams to upload images of products or plants for analysis. The deployment began with a single data source and has grown to integrate 20,000 data sources. The project started in 2024 and was developed by a multidisciplinary team including commercial staff to ensure immediate feedback. The rollout strategy focused on defining clear value baselines and measuring outcomes, avoiding overly broad or ambiguous goals. The success of the pilot led to transparent communication of value increments, which encouraged adoption by other teams and facilitated cross-border expansion.