Enterprise use of AI agents is on the rise, with 25% of enterprises using generative AI forecast to deploy AI agents in 2025, growing to 50% by 2027, according to Deloitte.
The rise of agents means we need to adopt a new mindset. Being prepared for reinvention is crucial in an AI-first future led by agents. Business leaders must operate like chefs, not cooks in a world of hyper-automation, connections, and real-time knowledge sharing.
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A cook uses recipes to create — learning by analogy. A chef does not need a recipe. A chef learns the taste of each ingredient and can combine the right ingredients to prepare a delicious plate — learning by first principles. A good chef also understands relationships between ingredients, dishes, the kitchen, staff, customers, and more.
Companies will invest heavily in AI agents as the world of work changes forever. According to tech analyst Gartner, agentic AI is the most important strategic technology for 2025 and beyond.
Agentic AI systems autonomously plan and take actions to meet user-defined goals. The technology offers a virtual workforce that can offload and augment human work. Gartner predicts that, by 2028, at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be taken autonomously through agentic AI, up from 0% in 2024.
So, how can businesses manage relationships between a human and AI digital workforce, collaborating to deliver value at the speed of need to all stakeholders? In a machine-led economy, how do we define healthy relationships between people and machines? The level of transformation ahead of us, including innovation velocity (speed and direction), will force business leaders to challenge legacy assumptions and orthodoxies.
The business world is full of orthodoxies, beliefs that no one questions because they are thought to be "just the way things are". One such orthodoxy is the phrase: "Our people are the difference". A simple Google search can attest to its popularity.
Some companies use this orthodoxy as their official or unofficial tagline, a tribute to their employees that they hope sends the right message internally and externally. They hope their employees feel special and customers take this orthodoxy as proof of their human goodness.
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Other firms use this orthodoxy as part of their explanation of what makes their company different. It's part of their corporate story. It sounds nice, caring, and positive. The only problem is that this orthodoxy is not true.
The most obvious reason is that most employees of nearly all companies have worked somewhere else before joining their current firm. And most have worked at one or more competitors. We know this fact because perhaps the most common phrase in recruiting history is the one in job postings that says, "Relevant industry experience mandatory."
Human resource managers appear to think prior experience in their industry is an essential quality for a prospective employee, even a deal breaker. It's another orthodoxy that should, by the way, be closely scrutinized for its value. The outcome is that everyone moves within their industry. So, it would be better to assert that "our people are reassuringly familiar".
However, there is another, less obvious, way this orthodoxy isn't true. This way might even be a more significant blocker to innovative thinking. It's the fact that what makes the difference is not the individual employee but the conditions set for them by the company culture and the relationships they are encouraged and allowed to make with each other, their customers, their bosses, and so on.
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The truth is that individuals can thrive in one environment and struggle in another. We see this most clearly in professional sports teams where trades can result in surprising performance changes.
Some players flourish in new surroundings and become highly valued team members after failing to differentiate themselves at their former club, while others fail to live up to expectations. In either case, the player is not the difference, though they can bloom or wilt. The determining factor is the conditions the players are placed in and the relationships they make, or do not make, that enable them to do so.
Another way to put this is that individual employees are not fixed assets. They do not behave the same way in all conditions. In most cases, employees are adaptable and can absorb and respond to change. The environment, conditions, and potential for relationships cause this capacity to express itself.
So, on the one hand, one company's employees are the same as any other company's employees in the same industry. They move from company to company, read the same magazines, attend similar conventions, and learn the same strategies and processes.
But at the same time, one employee can perform in one way at one company and very differently at another. They can be stars at one and struggle to shine at another. They can love working at one company and hate the same job at a different firm.
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Business leadership author Simon Sinek provides a clear example in one of his favorite true stories about a barista named Noah. He describes being at the Four Seasons Hotel in Las Vegas, ordering a coffee from Noah, and asking whether he enjoyed his job. Noah responded immediately: "I love it!" When asked why, he said it was because managers would check up on him frequently and ask him what they could do to help him.
Noah then said that he does the same job at a different hotel and the managers always check up on him but only to see what he's doing wrong. As a direct consequence his attitude to work there is entirely transactional. He puts in the hours, keeps his head down, and takes the paycheck.
Sinek is right to make the point that the experience Noah's customers get will be wildly different depending on which hotel he's serving them at. The same barista with the same job but two hotels with entirely different management philosophies and the employee's and his customers' experience of his service are night and day.
Sinek draws from this story the lesson that different leadership approaches can create different work conditions for their employees and elicit different experiences and performances. The lesson is that performance, the "difference" that companies seek from their people, is not an attribute that is owned or embodied solely by the individual employees themselves.
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Instead, performance is a shared attribute that emerges from the coming together of the employee and the conditions, the culture, and the other people with whom they interact, including but not limited to their managers. Performance is emergent and it is relational. As companies deploy agent AIs, creating a boundless digital workforce, where humans and agents work together to deliver customer success, business leaders must focus on designing healthy and sustainable relationships.
Relational intelligence, a practice we believe encompasses a framework for how people and machines can co-create real value for each other and all stakeholders, will determine who wins in a machine-led economy.
Companies that leave it up to their people to be the difference or to make the difference because, well, that's what the orthodoxy tells us, are at risk of missing a bigger truth — the relationships between people are more important to business success than the people themselves. Our relationships make the difference.
This article was co-authored by Henry King, business innovation and transformation strategy leader and co-author of Boundless: A New Mindset for Unlimited Business Success.
