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The debate over how to integrate AI agents into the workplace has produced no shortage of frameworks, mandates, and org-chart overhauls. And this week at Fortune\u2019s COO Summit, it produced something rarer: complete, 180-degree disagreement between two executives who have thought about this longer than almost anyone, and still left with no clean resolution.<\/p>\n
Eric Kelleher, President and COO of Okta, has named the agents on his team Leo, Sloan, Hank, and Walker (among others). They show up in business reviews alongside his human staff. The turning point, he said, came during a standup when he asked staff to give names to their own agents. \u201cIn that exercise, AI became a colleague as opposed to a tool,\u201d he told Fortune on the sidelines of the panel, \u201cand that catalyst is valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Francine Katsoudas, the Executive Vice President and Chief People, Policy & Purpose Officer at Cisco, heard something like that and pushed back hard. \u201cI would not look at AI as a colleague,\u201d she told a separate audience at the COO Summit just hours later. \u201cI think we should look at AI and agents as part of the workflow, but not a colleague. And I think the sooner we land that, the more confident our people will be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Both executives are operating at scale and are navigating the same underlying crisis: companies have largely figured out how to\u00a0experiment\u00a0with AI, but remain in experiment phase, if not in collective denial about how to actually redesign work around it. Cognizant, whose research team presented new data at the COO Summit, found that 93% of jobs are already being disrupted by AI\u2014six years ahead of their own 2023 projections. But the productivity gains that were supposed to follow haven\u2019t materialized. Their researchers called it an \u201cactivation gap.\u201d<\/p>\n
The debate over what to\u00a0call\u00a0agents might sound is not just semantics.<\/p>\n
Katsoudas also talked to Fortune Editorial Director Kristin Stoller about how Cisco handled 4,000 announced layoffs as part of an AI restructuring\u2014noting that on the teams using AI most effectively, trust within those teams actually began to drop about nine months in. \u201cWe just have to invest so much more,\u201d she said. \u201cWe have to share with our people what we know, what we don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n
The mechanism she\u2019s betting on: investing in skills, not just severance. In previous Cisco restructurings, pairing training with internal redeployment allowed the company to place 75% of impacted employees. \u201cJust imagine if that became 85 or 90 percent,\u201d Katsoudas said. \u201cIt would make people feel a lot less worried because they know they\u2019re going to land. She said it\u2019s what Cisco is \u201cworking through today. It\u2019s tough.\u201d<\/p>\n
A randomized experiment published by Harvard Business Review in May reached a similar conclusion from a different direction: humanizing AI can shift accountability away from individuals, increases escalation, and reduces the quality of human review\u2014the opposite of what most companies deploying agents are hoping for. A separate experiment by Boston Consulting Group found that human workers responded to their AI colleagues by scapegoating them and getting more careless with their own work. Research from the University of Arizona adds another wrinkle: disclosing AI use at work makes colleagues trust you less in the short term, but staying silent and getting caught later is worse. Companies are, in effect, caught in a transparency trap, honesty carries a social penalty, but concealment carries a steeper one.<\/p>\n
Franklin\u2019s answer to that trap is blunt governance.\u00a0\u201cWe don\u2019t just let any person into your home to talk to your children, eat your food, sleep in your bed,\u201d she said. \u201cYou ask them who they are, why they\u2019re there.\u201d The same logic, she argued, applies to AI. \u201cWe don\u2019t just let any AI in. We need to have clear guidelines and clear guardrails around what happens when you bring AI in.\u201d\u00a0It\u2019s a frame that treats trust not as a feeling to be managed but as a system to be designed, before the agents arrive, not after.<\/p>\n
Kelleher\u2019s concern runs the opposite direction. The problem, in his diagnosis, isn\u2019t that workers will feel displaced by agents with names\u2014it\u2019s that managers still aren\u2019t taking agents seriously enough as a category of labor. \u201cWe have trained every manager in the world to think about one thing,\u201d he said, \u201cand that is: what\u2019s their headcount? What\u2019s the org chart look like? Who reports to who?\u201d That thinking, he argued, doesn\u2019t fit this moment. His proposed fix: push token budgets down to people managers, forcing a concrete reckoning with a workforce that now includes AI agents operating alongside humans, and making that trade-off visible in the budget itself.<\/p>\n
Sarah Franklin, CEO of Lattice\u2014whose entire business is built around helping companies manage and develop their people\u2014made the same diagnosis from the other direction. The performance management process, she argued, is \u201cdeeply broken,\u201d because it\u2019s cyclical, once or twice a year, disconnected from how businesses actually move. AI has exposed that, rather than fixing it. \u201cYou set up your OKRs at the beginning of the year,\u201d she said, \u201cthen six months in, priorities have changed, focus has changed. Not that that\u2019s bad. It\u2019s that the performance process hasn\u2019t kept up with the business.\u201d<\/p>\n
What Kelleher and Franklin actually agree on, underneath the framing fight, is more important than the disagreement: the bottleneck is at the managerial level. Org charts, budget cycles, performance processes\u2014these were all built for a workforce of humans and not yet rebuilt for one that isn\u2019t. Cognizant\u2019s analysis of 80,000 tasks found that in 90% of them, a human still needs to be involved in some way. But whether they call the AI agents that they work alongside colleagues is the question. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe evolve from workforce planning to work planning,\u201d Kelleher said. \u201cWhat I\u2019m finding right now is that\u2019s a really big leap for people to make.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whether the agents helping bridge that gap are colleagues or tools may matter less than whether the humans managing them are finally forced to reckon with what work actually looks like now.<\/p>\n
For this story,\u00a0Fortune\u00a0journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.<\/p>\n
#treat #agents #colleagues #Fortune #executives #settle #debate<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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