Agentic AI, which makes decisions without human input, is a hot topic at Davos this year.
AI agents promise tangible benefits to companies but raise questions such as whether they should get KPIs.
Business leaders now have to work out how to manage autonomous bots alongside human employees.
Many companies are using AI to get better, faster, and leaner — but what happens when artificial intelligence is not just your tool but your colleague or your employee? Should it be trained like a human, given goals and performance metrics?
There’s a reality setting in at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year: business leaders will soon have to decide how to manage not only their human workforce but also a new class of AI employees while maintaining harmony between bots 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 was going to treat AI workers like humans by giving them official employee records and even putting them through onboarding like a real human employee. The actual humans weren’t keen on the idea and Lattice hit pause after the backlash.
Now, with talk of AI agents everywhere, Franklin says Lattice’s idea was “really prescient” if too early. “We were ahead, but by months.”
That may prove to be so. Agentic AI is a hot topic at Davos this year. The past two years have brought much hype around artificial intelligence, but agents — AI that can act and make decisions independent of user input — are what many stakeholders believe can provide tangible, immediate benefits. Or, as one exec in Davos put it, the time for kicking the tires is over. Businesses want returns on their investments — and agents are one way to get it.
Franklin is not the only one raising the flag on this topic. “I don’t think the world has yet had the opportunity to think through all of the implications,” Alan Flower, global head of AI at HCLTech, told Business Insider.
“For example, as a manager, I’m going to be managing a human workforce and an agentic workforce at the same time — they’re going to have to collaborate,” said Flower. “My agents are going to have to collaborate with agents from another company, for example.”
The question then, said Flower, is how do employers “broker” collaboration between agents — including from other companies —and motivate them to do good work?
“Will we get to a phase where agentic AI will be given KPIs? These are all considerations that the world of work is going to have to kind of contemplate,” Flower added, referring to key performance indicators.
