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The President and COO of Okta has agents on his team. He\u2019s named them\u2014Leo, Sloan, Hank, Walker\u2014and\u00a0they show up in business reviews alongside his human staff.\u00a0He\u2019s personally booked a flight to Bangalore and spent the entire trip standing up an open-source agent on a separate machine, a deliberate act of immersion he then assigned to every member of his leadership team. \u201cThat flight to me was transformative in how I recognized what the capabilities of this technology are,\u201d he told a roomful of top operations executives at the COO Summit this week.<\/p>\n
And yet, he added, the hardest part isn\u2019t the technology. It\u2019s the managers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have trained every manager in the world to think about one thing and that is: what\u2019s their headcount,\u201d Kelleher said. \u201cOur managers have spent decades learning how to think about headcounts and payroll.\u201d The shift he\u2019s advocating for at Okta \u2014 getting managers to budget explicitly for\u00a0both\u00a0human labor and digital labor, to think about work charts that include AI agents as genuine colleagues\u2014is, he said, \u201ca much harder problem than getting people to experiment with Claude Code.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things I\u2019m really advocating for within Okta is to get our managers thinking about how to design work to include human workers and digital workers,\u201d Kelleher told a room of top operations executives. \u201cEveryone has the mandate [to adopt AI],\u201d he said, but people are not really thinking through what it means to tackle that mandate. \u201cOne added piece that\u2019s very top of mind for me right now is: when we go into budget planning, when we go into cycles, we have trained every manager in the world to think about one thing and that is, what\u2019s their headcount? What\u2019s the org chart look like? Who reports to who? How many layers do we have? How does this span of control?\u201d That thinking doesn\u2019t fit this moment, he added.<\/p>\n
It was appropriate for the session hosted by Cognizant: New Work, New World: How AI is reshaping your org chart, with Head of Research Ollie O\u2019Donoghue and Chief Business Officer, AI, Sushant Warikoo, digging into the topic.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Kelleher\u2019s remarks crystallized a growing frustration among executives: companies have largely figured out how to\u00a0experiment\u00a0with AI, but remain in collective denial about how to actually\u00a0redesign\u00a0work around it.<\/p>\n
From headcount to \u2018work planning\u2018<\/p>\n
Kelleher\u2019s proposed solution is deceptively simple: stop thinking about labor purely in terms of people. His fix? Push token budgets down to people managers. The idea is to force a concrete reckoning with a workforce that now includes AI agents operating alongside human employees\u2014and to make that trade-off visible in the budget itself. \u201cWhat we want to start seeing is how do work charts evolve where we have digital workers working alongside human colleagues,\u201d he said. The current conversation is focused too much on AI displacing jobs, he said, \u201cnot changing the nature of work itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kelleher\u2019s remarks came as Cognizant released new research showing that the AI transformation is happening far faster than anyone predicted\u2014and yet its value is failing to materialize. In 2023, the firm projected 90% of jobs would be disrupted by AI by 2032. Today, that figure is already 93%, six years ahead of schedule. But the productivity gains that were supposed to follow haven\u2019t.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Donoghue described this as an \u201cactivation gap,\u201d or a chasm between what AI can theoretically do and what companies are actually achieving. \u201cThere\u2019s a bit of a disconnect between theory and reality,\u201d O\u2019Donoghue said, citing analysis of 80,000 different tasks, conducted each of the last three years. \u201cNinety percent of the tasks that we analyze \u2026 the human still needs to be involved in some way.\u201d<\/p>\n
That makes the organizational redesign problem more urgent, not less. If humans are still in the loop, the question isn\u2019t whether to replace them\u2014it\u2019s how to restructure their roles around machines that are increasingly capable of doing the transactional parts of their jobs.<\/p>\n
The harder management problem<\/p>\n
Several executives in attendance described trying to crack this problem from different angles. Jon Blotner, President of Wayfair, said the company had reversed course on a top-down AI mandate and instead gave every employee access to Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT\u2014then watched teams start reinventing their own roles. \u201cWe see people reinvent their jobs and say, okay, look, I basically automated my work,\u201d he said. \u201cThat person\u2019s incredibly valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cognizant\u2019s Warikoo agreed that is the unsexy core of the problem. \u201cHumans and agents have equal privilege,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the entire architecture for enterprises was built on the notion of humans working on business workflows with static application architectures.\u201d AI agents require persistent context and operate continuously, a fundamentally different model than the episodic, batch-driven systems enterprises were built around.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not about the AI,\u201d Warikoo said. \u201cAt the end of it, it\u2019s about the humans. It\u2019s about amplifying human potential, where humans get to do higher-value work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kelleher\u2019s diagnosis is that most organizations aren\u2019t there yet. The instinct, still, is to think about digital workers the way companies once thought about software: as a tool employees use, not as a category of labor to be managed, budgeted for, and integrated into the org chart alongside people.<\/p>\n
\u201cI see the future now,\u201d Kelleher told Fortune on the sidelines of the panel, \u201cand it\u2019s clear to me, we\u2019re not going back.\u201d He said a turning point for him was a standup with staff when he asked staff to give names to thieir OpenClaw agents. \u201cIn that exercise, AI became a colleague as opposed to a tool and that catalyst is valuable.\u201d He agreed that it is similar to the adoption of electricity, when whole factories were slow to realize they didn\u2019t need their old steam engines anymore. He said it\u2019s similar to how current AI adoption is \u201cjust, like, asking people to add chatbots.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later that afternoon, Kelleher told other executives that his team has started realizing that digital agents are colleagues, of sorts. \u201cIt\u2019s really uncomfortable, but it\u2019s very transformative.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe evolve from workforce planning to work planning,\u201d Kelleher told the room. \u201cWhat I\u2019m finding right now is that\u2019s a really big leap for people to make.\u201d<\/p>\n
#Oktas #President #COO #companies #denial #hardest #part #revolution #redesigning #work<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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