AI Agents, The New Workforce We’re Not Quite Ready For (Agentic AI)

The Agents are coming, the Agents are coming.

If you follow the AI tech market you know there’s a lot of talk about “Agentic AI.” In other words, our friendly AI assistants are starting to feel more empowered. Instead of just answering questions and composing poetry, they’re now able to “do things” on our behalf.

This is the long-predicted next-big thing in AI.  Eric Schmidt recently talked about it, Microsoft’s talking about it, and investors like Mayfield are funding it. And this evolution is really going to revolutionize our systems.

Think about it this way: the “Large Language Models” we’ve been learning about for the last two years are now turning into “Large Action Models.” The agent won’t just answer questions, it will also do things for us.

The consumer use cases are endless: book me a flight, buy me a ticket, send an email to my friend. But in the business world this shift is going to upend and disrupt many of our enterprise systems. And it changes how we work, manage, and think about our teams.

Consider two HR use-cases we’ve been talking with vendors about.

The L&D AI Agent

Imagine an L&D AI agent that you direct to “Build me a 15 minute course to teach our sales people how to position our new product.” The AI Agent will take your input (length, target audience, etc), send emails to subject matter experts, video-record their comments and expertise, combine the content and aggregate the new product information, build the course, and send an email to the L&D leader for validation. You, as the manager, can now review the course and tell the agent to tighten the message or add a few more topics, the course will be re-created, and then you say “it’s ready to go.” The agent then publishes the course into the LMS, sends a broadcast communication email to all your sales people, and starts monitoring activity. A few hours later the Agent runs analytics and gives the manager feedback on how well it’s going.

Yes, this is all possible today. And this is going to launch soon.

Here’s a second one.

The Recruiter AI Agent

The Talent Acquisition leader gets a bunch of job requisitions for senior software engineers. She tells the Recruiter AI Agent to start the search. The agent asks the recruiter for location preferences, job level options, pay ranges, and skills – and then goes to work. The agent scans LinkedIn and other sourcing tools, looks into the ATS for existing candidates, and also looks at all the internal staff with qualified skills. The Agent then starts optimizing this list to create a “short list” for interviews, and goes back to the TA leader for input. After agreeing on location and pay range, the Agent goes back and sends a compelling email to these candidates, along with a link to a video-interview portal that lets them take an interview. The interview is recorded and the AI Agent uses the interview intelligence tool to assess and filter the candidates, asks them for schedules and sets them up for live interviews. In the process the AI Agent looks at their backgrounds, searches social media, looks at their various connections, and possibly looks up their GitHub and other credentials – then creates a portfolio for each candidate.

These agents are coming soon, and they will look and feel like “employees” to many of us. We will have to train them, onboard them, and coach them. And as they “mature” and grow into their roles, we’ll be connecting them to more systems, more people, and more data.

Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin actually introduced this concept about a month ago, and despite the backlash I think she was right. These Agents will actually belong in the organization chart. And our job will be to manage them, make sure they’re safe, and watch over their security.

More To Come

If you don’t believe me, look at the existing Agents below. These are new services (we’re now shifting from “Software as a Service” to “Services through Software”) from Mayfield-funded startups. You can buy them today.

While it feels like science fiction, this is happening now. And it’s not only going to change our HR technology stack, it’s going to change the whole enterprise technology landscape. And also make our HR roles much easier.

I”m going to be talking about this new era of “Agentic AI” at my keynotes at HR Technology Vegas, Workday Rising, and Unleash in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more on this topic, and I also discuss this topic in this weekend’s Josh Bersin Company podcast. And Galileo, our AI Assistant for HR, is going to become an AI HR teammate as well.

Additional Information

Artificial Intelligence in HR: Certificate Course From The Josh Bersin Academy

Introducing Galileo™, The World’s First AI-Powered Expert Assistant For HR

Autonomous Corporate Learning Platforms: Arriving Now, Powered by AI