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Who Will Manage The Agents?

Nick Burling, Senior Vice President of Product at Nasuni. The storage administrator has long been one of the least appreciated jobs in large organizations. These experienced IT professionals manage capacity and access, set up new offices and wind down divested locations. When a user accidentally deletes or loses a file, they track it down, and they are responsible for ensuring data is protected in the event of a disaster. However, they rarely get any credit. Today, as more large organizations look to deploy agentic AI capable of automating so many enterprise tasks, the job of the storage administrator appears to be endangered. Yet, I suspect these individuals are going to be more important than ever in the years ahead. Enterprises are going to need experts with core foundational knowledge and professionals who understand the big picture and can assess what needs to be fixed when those AI agents make mistakes. At the same time, automating the tasks that take up so much time today will allow storage administrators to take on higher-level strategic work. The job isn't going away; it's going to get more interesting. Consider a few sample tasks assigned to the storage administrator today. Let's say a user in a distant office sends an alert that they've lost a critical folder. Maybe they've deleted it—the user isn't certain. All they know is that they absolutely need access restored as soon as possible; otherwise, the world will end. Traditionally, this sort of emergency would send the storage administrator off on a digital wild-goose chase, trying to understand whether that user accidentally moved or erased the folder or if someone else in the organization did so. This is the kind of task that a trained AI agent would be able to handle efficiently. A scan of the organization's audit logs would quickly reveal whether the folder had been deleted or moved and which user was responsible for the action. The agent could then immediately report the findings to the administrator for review, with the option of triggering a restore of the deleted data. As the head of product for a company that specializes in data management and AI readiness, I've come across many other examples with our customers. For example, one of the large enterprises we work with wants to use agentic AI to prebuild new file data directories from a template, making it easier to kick off new projects. In the past, this sort of work might have taken a few days or even weeks, depending on the availability of the storage administrator. Instead, the storage professional could create a set of templates for different project types and train an agent to set them up on command. Rather than doing the grunt work, the storage administrator acts as the high-level designer and final set of eyes to review the agent's work before it is completed. Once many of their tasks become automated, storage administrators will take on new roles such as: Data Stewards The success of an enterprise's AI plans hinges on its ability to manage, unify and curate its data. Whether the goal is to train an AI solution or use one to find hidden patterns and insights in your organization's data, you are going to need skilled storage administrators who understand where all of that data resides and how to connect it. AI Managers Rather than overseeing a department of humans, storage administrators will manage a suite of AI agents. Obviously, this will be a very different type of managerial job that doesn't involve repairing fragile egos or cheerleading. (Unless the agents become sentient, in which case we all have other problems to worry about.) However, it's going to be enormously important to get this right, and no one will be better positioned to do so than the storage administrators who deeply understand the work that needs to be done. Task Experts AI agents will make mistakes, so organizations are going to need domain experts who deeply understand the task the agents were assigned to perform and how it fits within the larger IT environment. That human knowledge and high-level understanding are going to be essential to ensure the agents are a truly effective addition to the enterprise. Business Strategists Even with these additional roles and responsibilities, storage administrators will likely still have extra cycles, given how many time-sucking tasks will be taken out of their hands. Generally, the companies that master data management are going to have a major competitive advantage, and storage administrators are uniquely positioned to identify solutions and approaches that go beyond storage and transform data into a reliable, accessible source of business intelligence. Given the potential expansion of the role, we are left with one question: Are these long-overlooked enterprise professionals finally going to be appreciated? Although the outlook for many knowledge workers appears uncertain in the age of AI, the future of storage administrators looks bright, and I believe enterprises will finally value these IT professionals appropriately. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?