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We are moving from the hybrid workplace, with the flexibility to work where and when you want, to the hybrid workforce, where humans and AI agents work together. For knowledge workers, the rise of the hybrid workforce addresses a key workplace concern: the increasing amount of time spent on repetitive tasks during their workday. Asana reports 54% of knowledge workers’ time is spent on busy work—repetitive administrative tasks that AI agents can automate. But beyond efficiency, AI agents can autonomously execute tasks and personalize the employee experience.
Marco Argenti, CIO of Goldman Sachs, predicts that companies will eventually “employ’” and train AI agents to be part of hybrid teams comprised of humans and machines. HR and business leaders will expand their role not only dealing with the implications of hybrid workplaces on company culture and performance, but also deploying, orienting, training, and managing a hybrid workforce.
What Does this Hybrid Workforce Mean for Leaders?
As AI Agents expand into a range of business functions, I see five implications leaders must keep in mind.
1. AI Middle Managers Will Be Created to Handle Multiple Agents
Just as every great team needs an inspiring manager, every AI ecosystem needs an AI middle manager. This is sometimes also known as an AI Agent Orchestrator, which functions like a middle manager: managing specialized agents, understanding the role of each agent, and ensuring each has the right documentation to do their job.
This is already happening at Databricks, where multiple AI powered agents are “managed” by an AI Agent Orchestrator powered by Uplimit to personalize virtual instructor led training programs. The AI Agent Orchestrator ensures each specialist agent can answer a myriad of questions from logistical to content related queries.Jody Soeiro de Faria, Area Vice President, Learning & Enablement says, “Using Uplimit has unlocked the potential to decrease the time to develop say a three-hour courses from three weeks to possibly 3-4 days, and also personalizes the learner experience allowing learners a chance to practice new skills as they go through a course. Highly personalized learning recommendations are moving from being a vision to a reality at Databricks.”
2. AI Agents Will Be Listed on the Company Organization Chart
As AI evolves beyond automation, AI agents are taking on roles that require reasoning, context-processing, and decision-making. Let’s imagine the first day of a new hire. She receives her laptop, phone, email address, Slack and other collaboration tools, and access to her own AI agent working alongside her.
Now, picture the first all hands management meeting this new hire attends. The team leader shows the organization chart, and next to each work team is the AI agent that collaborates with the team daily.
Sound farfetched? No, it highlights the importance of integrating AI into the workforce as well as reinforcing that leaders are no longer just managing human workers, they are also responsible for the deployment and collaboration of humans and AI across the enterprise.
3. A Holistic Approach Is Needed For Sourcing, Deploying, and Managing AI Agents
As AI agent use cases explode across the enterprise one question keeps coming up: who will source, evaluate, and manage the deployment of these agents? Will this fall to Corporate IT or HR? At the World Economic Forum, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang shared his prediction, “The IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future.” But Alan Flower, Executive Vice President, CTO, & Global Head of AI & Cloud Native Labs at HCLTech, counters with, “Will the selection and management of AI Agents fall under the remit of the IT or HR organization? Technology is moving so quickly; I think leaders need to prepare to weave agentic technology into the culture of their organization.”
Embedding agentic technology into the culture will require companies to think holistically about the creation and deployment of hundreds of AI agents across multiple disciplines from finance to customer supply, engineering, and HR. Managing the sourcing and deployment of AI agents is a cross-functional remit so teams of HR, IT, Business, Finance, and Legal will need to manage the AI agent life cycle and propose new initiatives and skills needed by humans in working alongside AI as well as leaders, managing teams of humans and AI agents.
4. A Growing AI Gender Gap Needs to Be Closed So AI Benefits All Workers
Randstad finds that 71% of AI-skilled workers are men and just 29% are women – a 42 percentage point gender gap. Just over a third of women have been offered access by their employers to use AI in their role (35%) compared with two-fifths of men (41%), and men are 10% more likely than women to use AI to problem-solve at work.
In AI training programs, studies show that women are 16 percentage points less likely than men to use AI tools in the same job. This gender gap is even more pronounced for younger employees. Slack Workforce Lab reports that men between 18 to 29 are 25% more likely to have experimented with artificial intelligence technology than their female counterparts.
A gender gap is also present among frequent users of generative AI, with more men using generative AI on a weekly basis than women. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank Survey of Consumer Expectations finds this gender gap is not driven by demographic characteristics such as income, education, age, or race. Instead, it is due to whether workers have been trained to use generative AI and their attitudes toward privacy and trust. Women tend to be more concerned than men about the negative consequences of sharing data. This gender gap is also evident in AI course enrollments reported by Coursera. Men make up the bulk of generative AI course enrollments with men representing 68% globally, compared to 32% for women.
Women must be encouraged to engage with AI, trained on how to use AI, and encouraged to share their perspectives and experiences with other women.
5. AI Powered Personalization of Employee Experience Is Here
Personalization is no longer just a consumer expectation; it is an employee demand. Millennials (born 1981–1996), and Gen Z workers (born 1997–2012) now make up 54% of the workforce. These workers expect the same type of personalization in the workplace they are used to in their personal lives. AI powered personalization of employee experience is following the path of consumer platforms such as Duolingo, which uses AI to customize learning paths, enhance engagement, and improve retention rates.
Wiley leveraged AI agents to achieve a 50% reduction in onboarding time and has reported a 213% return on investment. Also, as I shared in 13 HR Jobs of the Future, ING is leveraging AI to create personalized content for managers to communicate with new hires about the company and their new team between the time a new hire accepts the job and starts at the job. As employee turnover is growing from acceptance to starting work in a new job for senior external hires, there is an opportunity to apply AI powered personalization to enhance retention.
While AI powered personalization in the workplace delivers a host of benefits, it comes with a number of issues for leaders to consider in how they manage this hybrid workforce.
Some questions leaders should be asking themselves and their teams include:
- How will AI agents align with our strategic business priorities? What problem will we solve by launching AI agents for a specific task?
- What are the implications for privacy as more AI tools include a human voice in role plays and simulations? What new policies will be put into place to safeguard employees?
- What measures are we using to track AI agent effectiveness? How can AI agents drive value beyond productivity to also enhance the employee and learner experience? ?
- How are we training our human workers to work alongside AI agents? What if an employee notes her underperformance is due to an AI agent’s underperformance?
- How will AI agents impact human workers skill development as human skills (critical thinking, communication, and creativity) increasingly become the new hard skills of the future. What re-skilling investment is the company making in areas where AI agents are being deployed?
By 2028, Gartner estimates one third of all use cases of generative AI will use AI agents. HR and business leaders: what questions are you discussing as the hybrid workforce gains momentum across your enterprise?