This article was first published in MIT Sloan Management Review and is available via subscription.
Organizations are rapidly adopting agentic AI; many are treating it simply as a tool—a way to reduce costs or accelerate innovation. To capture the technology’s full benefits, though, companies need to treat agents as workers. And yet, how do organizations manage a new, nonhuman actor—one that is both a tool and a worker?
Sam Ransbotham, David Kiron, Shervin Khodabandeh, Sesh Iyer, and Amartya Das contend that traditional management frameworks will no longer work. Governance must be a mandatory, cross-functional effort where IT, HR, finance, and operations collaborate and devise a unified framework. Strategic oversight, ethical governance, and the ability to orchestrate human-AI teams will become critical human skills. The organizations that thrive will be those that focus less on the technology and more on the human systems that surround it.