- Agentic artificial intelligence, which makes decisions without human input, is a hot topic at Davos this year.
- AI agents promise tangible benefits for companies, but raise questions such as whether they should receive KPIs.
- Business leaders must now work out how to manage autonomous robots alongside human employees.
Many companies are using AI to become better, faster and leaner – but what happens when AI is not just your tool, but your colleague or employee? Should it be trained like a human, with goals and performance metrics in mind?
It’s a reality established at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year: business leaders will soon have to decide how to manage not only their workforce, but also a new class of AI workers, while maintaining harmony among robots and people.
It’s something Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin has spent a lot of time thinking about. Her company, which builds HR software, announced last year that it would treat AI employees like people by giving them official employee data and even onboarding them like a real human employee . The actual people weren’t keen on the idea and Lattice quit after the backlash.
Now, when it comes to AI agents everywhere, Franklin says Lattice’s idea was “really prescient” if it was too early. “We were ahead, but by months.”
It may be so. Agentive AI is a hot topic at Davos this year. The last couple of years have brought a lot of buzz around artificial intelligence, but agents – AI that can act and make decisions independent of user input – are what many stakeholders believe can deliver tangible and immediate benefits. Or, as one executive said in Davos, the time to kick the tires is over. Businesses want returns on their investments – and agents are one way to get it.
Franklin is not alone in raising the flag on this topic. “I don’t think the world has had a chance to think through all the implications yet,” Alan Flower, global head of AI at HCLTech, told Business Insider.
“For example, as a manager, I’ll be managing a human workforce and an agent workforce at the same time — they’ll have to collaborate,” Flower said. “My agents will have to partner with agents from another company, for example.”
The question then, Flower said, is how do employers “broker” cooperation between agents — including other companies — and motivate them to do good work?
“Will we get to a stage where agent AI will be given KPIs? These are all considerations that the world of work will have to think about,” Flower added, referring to key performance indicators.
‘How do I manage them?’
Franklin says one of the mistakes Lattice made with its announcement last year was how it communicated it. “People are more comfortable with the word ‘agent’ than ‘digital worker,'” she said. Franklin added, “There’s a huge lack of education about what AI is and a disbelief that AI will be able to have the kinds of conversations it can.”
This is a huge opportunity for HR leaders, Franklin said. And, of course, to Lattice, which counts OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic among its clients.
Becky Frankiewicz, chief commercial officer at ManpowerGroup, told BI that she’s heard a lot of talk about whether companies will need “AI managers” for their AI agents.
“I think the first step in figuring out how to manage these AI workers is, how do I deploy them and make them productive? And then the second step is, how do I manage them?”
Frankiewicz said she knew of a consulting company that was already grappling with this. “They’ve done the agents already,” she said. “The next question they asked was: should we have managers for agents?”
Lattice’s Franklin thinks the discussion about AI in the workplace isn’t being taken seriously enough — and it needs to be soon.
“The reality is that today, AI is being implemented as agents to have conversations on behalf of brands, on behalf of people,” Franklin said, adding that it’s a huge amount of trust to place in AI without proper governance. As agents take on more responsibility, more governance will be needed – but that means accepting the new reality and having those conversations.
“We need everyone to get to this place where they’re comfortable, they’re not afraid,” she said. “And we can work alongside AI in the workforce in a way that feels natural.”
