Agentic AI in the workplace is changing how people do their jobs—and changing what’s expected.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it depends on how the changes are applied, as Appfire CTO Ed Frederici told IT Brew. Appfire prefers a human-centric approach, Frederici said, but that’s not necessarily true across the industry. Some tech leaders are using the implementation of agents to avoid giving the real reason for layoffs.
“We had a long period of time where companies overhired and overstaffed and put themselves in a position where their cost model was untenable, and you see a correction occurring as they let people go,” Frederici explained. “It’s a convenient way for companies to kind of hide the fact that they made poor hiring decisions.”
Change is coming. You can see the change in a June KPMG survey with 87% of tech leaders saying they “think agents will require organizations to redefine performance metrics, and will also prompt organizations to upskill employees currently in roles that may be displaced.” Edwige Sacco, KPMG’s head of workforce innovation, told IT Brew that she sees the change in metrics as a positive development that can adjust expectations for the better.
“We’re telling people your work is changing, the world is changing, the workforce, the workplace is changing,” Sacco said. “We’re going to do everything we can to get you there, but we need you on this journey with us.”
In order to adjust those expectations in the most human-centric way, Sacco continued, the workforce will have to change how it operates with respect to AI, and looking at team metrics and how people work with agents rather than at individual accomplishments will be key. But the first step is adoption.
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“It’s about getting our people first to welcome the entity into their lives—be it some combination of personal and, of course, in the workplace—and then giving them the skills, the confidence, the language that they need to develop a healthy relationship,” Sacco said.
Some companies, like Cisco, want to take advantage of the “gold rush” opportunity agentic AI offers. At this year’s Cisco Live conference, the firm’s president and CPO Jeetu Patel said Cisco aims to be “the infrastructure company that powers AI during the agentic movement.”
Human-first approach. Appfire’s approach is a good example of human-centric AI adoption, Frederici said, as the company utilizes agentic AI to accentuate existing staffers and made a conscious decision not to replace employees with agents.
“Every response that is generated outside of the app context that uses AI still involves the human being,” Frederici said. “One of the benefits it’s had for us is in a standard world, a single support agent can be a master of about five applications.”
While things could change in the future, for now Frederici believes the best way for AI to function within the workplace is alongside a human operator. Businesses will have to weigh what’s most important.
“You have a corporate responsibility to both your customers and your employees to ensure that, as you adopt AI, you do it in a way that provides the greatest value to both of those constituencies,” Frederici said. “And your ultimate role as a business is to provide the best value to your client, and today that is still 100% including the human being.”