Your smartest employee might not be human

For business leaders right now, two small words seem almost impossible to avoid: AI agents. Built on the ‘brain’ of an AI model, and armed with a specific purpose and access to tools, agents are autonomous decision-makers that are being increasingly integrated into live business processes.

Unlike normal AI tools, which rely on user prompts, agent-based – agentic – AI can execute tasks iteratively, making decisions that carry real business consequences, and real governance risk. In short, agents aren’t tools, they’re teammates. As well as sitting in an organization’s tech stack, they sit on its org chart.

Marc Benioff, cofounder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, the $260 billion valued software giant, says that today’s CEOs will be the last to manage all-human workforces. (Asked if an agent could replace him some day, Benioff responded, half-joking, “I hope so.”) The sooner businesses recognize this shift, the ...