Industry is experiencing Agentic AI wave, which is about AI systems possessing certain degree of autonomy to make decisions based on the information they process. Unlike traditional AI tools, agentic AI operates with sense of purpose, executing tasks without constant human supervision.
These systems are designed to interact with their environment, adapt to changes, and achieve specific goals, making them highly suitable for dynamic applications. Agentic AI tops up AI implementation with combined techniques like reinforcement learning, vision computing and natural language processing to optimize decision-making and interaction capabilities.
Agentic AI holds immense promise for transforming industries and improving operational efficiency, especially in the areas where human intervention might be limited or impractical. Many of the current implementations, however, focus on what humans do and how their actions can be offset or accelerated using Agentic AI.
While this is a welcome trend to displace mundane activities, the very concept of agentic AI raises questions about control, accountability, and ethical considerations. As these systems gain more autonomy, ensuring their actions align with human values and societal norms becomes crucial. There are many trainings, tutorials and perspectives on how organizations can quickly build Agentic AI capabilities. However, one of the aspects organizations needs to think about is retaining human touch. Let us consider following where human touch has played significant role so far:
- Learning on the job: every leader in the industry, no matter how self-made he/she is, has learnt something from their seniors or peers. These learnings come from passive observations or recollection of solutions provided by their team or experienced individuals. Over-the-shoulder learning – where team members learn from their seniors or expert peers by looking over their shoulder while the experts demonstrate their know-how of solving a specific problem. This kind of passive or active learning has been a key element of knowledge hand-off/exchange where people learn from each other. How would your organization prepare for such learnings in the presence of Agentic AI? What role do you foresee seniors to play and what additional role do you foresee Agentic AI to play?
- Water-cooler-moment: friendly informal conversations over a cup of coffee or bumping into a colleague while fetching water are quoted to be source of new inspirations. There are instances of eureka moments from sudden awareness about certain challenges faced by a colleague or a solution they have for your problem. The sense of curiosity and contributing towards solving something important while getting to know your colleagues made people look forward to such events, no wonder many companies are known to organize such informal gatherings to boost their collective problem-solving abilities. How do you foresee outcome of such discussions in the era of Agentic AI? Especially where AI is autonomous. What kind of knowledge and skill do you expect your team to possess for meaningful conversations as Agentic AI would have retuned itself to do something differently?
- Decision-Making Independence: juniors may rely on AI for decision support instead of consulting seniors, shifting the dynamic of learning through human expertise. While there are some positive aspects to it, the reliance on Agentic AI may compromise overall thinking experience. One of the major risks in this process is hallucination, AI can confidently hallucinate blurring difference between reality and imagination. One can imagine how this can be detrimental to juniors who are still in learning mode. How do you ensure measures are built to avoid decision fallouts? How would you mentor and coach new joiners?
When you start thinking about this topic there are many other areas of challenges such as reduced interpersonal skill development due to AI-mediation, understanding collaboration dynamics, soft-skill development challenges doe to reduced human interaction or imbibing value driven thinking to name few more, role displacement due to insomniac Agentic AI, etc.
Some of the trends influence the status-quo in a much greater way that others do, take for example industrial revolution, it changed the way organizations were structured. To a greater extent Agentic AI is going to influence the way we model organizations over a period of next 4-5 years. For instance, consider vibe coding, in its nascent stage of Agentic AI, it has already started influencing how we write code and how we think about software engineering concepts that have evolved over 3-4 decades.
In conclusion, while Agentic AI presents many opportunities, it also requires enterprises to think about how they model their organizations and human capital to be future ready. How an organization is balancing AI integration with human interaction will be crucial to ensure holistic development of future workforce. Here are few more parting questions. How are you thinking about balancing human intelligence while adopting Agentic AI? What kind of organization changes and readjustments are you doing? How are you preparing your current workforce to be Agentic AI ready? What are your expectations from new joiners, especially fresh grads?
MavenSpeak 