5 days ago
How To Prepare Teams For Their New AI Agent Coworkers
Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash
At the end of February, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made a shocking announcement: he wouldn't be hiring any more software engineers in 2025. Instead, he'd be going all in on Agentforce, the company's agentic AI system designed to handle multi-step processes all on its own.
Benioff is a true believer in the power of agentic AI to revolutionize how work gets done. At the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, he also painted a picture of how agents will integrate into the workforce—in sales, for example, human agents will assume new roles as their AI counterparts resolve support inquiries.
"We are really moving into a world now of managing humans and agents together," he said.
I'm inclined to agree. AI agents are still new, and there are still a lot of kinks to work out before they reach their full potential. Still, effective leaders should be thinking about how their new blended teams will look—and how they can best equip their existing, human workers for this new reality.
There is a right way for leaders to begin integrating agents onto teams—and then there is the other way. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has taken the second route, pronouncing that partially automating his human workforce has saved his company millions, and that he is 'of the opinion that AI can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans, do.'
This isn't actually true, at least not yet—but it is a great way to alarm your employees, zapping them of their motivation.
Instead, leaders should set their teams up for success by helping to identify opportunities for AI-human collaboration. One way to do this is for teams to ensure that agents are working with good data, weeding out wrong or incomplete information and regularly optimizing and providing feedback.
Additionally, the more employees actually work with agents, the more they'll understand their abilities—and limitations. For example, Jotform's recently-released AI agent is already being heavily used by our own support team to cut down on routine requests and make their lives easier. I've made it clear that these new automated teammates are not out for their jobs—instead, they're significantly increasing the speed and volume at which we're able to address issues.
Another one of Siemiatkowski's divisive sound bites is that AI is so advanced, it's even capable of replacing CEOs like him, arguing that AI reasoning has reached C-suite levels.
Don't get me wrong—AI agents are excellent at many things, and can capably complete many tasks from end-to-end all on their own. There's a reason that, according to one survey, 51 percent of organizations are exploring the use of AI agents, with 37 percent actively piloting them.
But AI, agentic and otherwise, is not especially creative. It can, when prompted, offer ideas and serve as a useful sounding board. It's also great at generating drafts and outlines, reducing the 'blank page' anxiety that torments so many of us in the early stages of the creative process. But for now at least, AI is not cut out for doing work that involves high levels of empathy, nor is it good at making gut-based decisions where little information is available.
For leaders and employees alike, our ability to form relationships, think outside the box and make empathetic decisions is where we shine. Research shows that most employees—83 percent—believe that AI will make uniquely human skills even more crucial, while 76 percent crave more human connection as AI grows.
As AI agents enter the workplace, leaders should empower their teams to spend more time flexing their creative muscles. Encourage an environment where employees are free to brainstorm, collaborate, and test-drive ideas—all while using agents to facilitate the process.
Say a team is kicking around a new product idea. An AI agent can gather market intelligence from customer service logs, social media, and internal analytics, testing its viability and accomplishing in minutes what would have previously taken days (and far more resources). This increased efficiency, in turn, creates the space for even more collaborative brainstorming, effectively propelling the creative cycle forward.
Employees at every level will need to get comfortable delegating routine tasks to AI—and some will be more receptive than others. Slack even published an 'AI persona quiz' to determine how readily people will accept agentic teammates, with results ranging from 'Maximalists,' who are all aboard the AI train; to 'Observers,' who are cautiously watching from the sidelines.
A good AI policy accounts for this range of comfort levels. But oddly, data from Slack found that 40 percent of workers said their organization has no AI policy at all; 48 percent reported they would hesitate to tell their managers they were using it for their work.
This is the opposite of how it should be. Rather than remaining mum on the subject of AI, leaders should be having proactive conversations about their expectations for its usage, and how they anticipate the adoption of agents to change workflows. Saying nothing not only fails to help your teams unlock the incredible benefits of agentic AI, it also creates the perfect environment for confusion and fear to take hold.
AI agents are changing how work gets done, for the better. But the transition will not happen automatically. Adoption will require strong and transparent policies, where teams are not treated as afterthoughts to exciting new technology, but as an essential part of the journey.
