Will agentic AI change everything?

Will IT pros lose their jobs to a swarm of chatbots?

The short answer: not yet. But with agentic AI rapidly evolving, there’s the possibility that IT pros could find themselves out of the loop with their own workflows, especially if they don’t upskill.

Very few companies “have gone all in yet [on agentic], because it is still an immature market, it’s a nascent space,” said Robert Barton, a distinguished AI engineer at Cisco. “It’s developing fast, but you definitely expect it to do things much faster, much quicker than you ever could in the past.”

While few are convinced that AI will replace the existing professionals within the industry, experts like Ketan Babaria, chief digital and AI officer at eHealth, told IT Brew that he expects his IT team to change because of agentic integration.

“As people become more and more proficient with it, they’ll think about other use cases to apply it, so that [the] experience’s better for both employees and for customers,” Babaria said.

I’m tired of upskilling, grandpa. There’s a seemingly constant call for IT professionals to upskill, train in new areas, and close any knowledge gap. In that spirit, how can they boost their useful knowledge of agentic AI?

IT pros should focus on specific skills for building AI agent systems, according to Barton, who pointed to processes like Model Context Protocol (MCP) for integrating software systems. MCP, created by Anthropic, is an open standard that allows agents to access the right context at the right time, in addition to integration capabilities, according to Hugging Face.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), in a roadmap for agentic deployment, wrote that the deployment of AI agents requires an increased focus on evaluating the safety of agents and their operations, as well as the ability to build modular frameworks that can “handle agentic behavior, including when agents exceed confidence thresholds and defer decisions.”

While not all IT pros who interact with AI will need to know the “minutia” of those protocols and how they work, they can expect to see changing workflows as the market embraces agents.

“IT professionals need to understand that the way you worked in the past is going to change, and if you’re not willing to change, you’re going to be left behind,” Barton said. “Frankly, we can do things differently now. The competitive ones, the ones that are going to change the game are those pace setters that are changing their patterns. The ones that refuse to adopt AI and agentic systems, they’re quickly going to be replaced.”

Try to keep up. Barton said AI agents could benefit teams that want to speed up tasks such as finding vulnerabilities or ensuring compliance.

However, these tools are still immature, which could encourage hesitation among lead developers and other IT pros. “Now we’re dealing with brand new protocols that didn’t exist, like MCP,” Barton said. “It was only introduced last year…and it’s been this mad rush to help this protocol mature and develop control and contribute to the standard.”

If an IT team leader is hesitant to implement the technology, and a professional wants to convince others to prepare for an agentic future, Barton said that the first thing to do is self education.

“We talk about agentic, we have a good intuition [of] what it is, but a lot of people don’t,” Barton said. “They hear the buzzword and they don’t quite know what that means…They don’t really have a clear intuition [about] what it is and what it means. Once they start to see what it is, this lightbulb moment happens, like, ‘Oh my goodness, there’s so much I could do with this.’”