Learning to lead in a hybrid human-AI enterprise

As adoption of AI agents looks set to surge by as much as 300% in the next two years, leadership teams are carefully considering the implications of a hybrid human-AI workforce.

Unlike existing enterprise-level automation that relies on manual input, AI agents are capable of autonomously coordinating complex tasks, interacting with multiple tools and environments across an organization. In early applications that center on customer service, HR, and sales, adoption of agentic AI has led to productivity gains of 30-50% .

Their autonomy positions agents more as collaborators than tools, working side-by-side with human employees in blended teams that look poised to upend traditional workplace dynamics.

More than three-quarters of HR leaders believe that the deployment of AI agents will transform existing workplace norms, driving a complete reappraisal of how roles and responsibilities are distributed, how skills are prioritized, and how workplace culture is shaped.

Though many admit they’re in the early or preparatory phase of this shift, 86% of chief HR officers predict that navigating digital labor shaped by agentic AI will be a central component of their role in the years ahead.

Fluency in the change management aspect of agentic AI adoption will be a crucial differentiator when it comes to unlocking the full potential of the technology going forward, believes Ateet Jayaswal, chief culture and employee experience officer at Wipro, a leading technology services and consulting company. This moment is one that he says, “calls for a mindset shift in how HR leaders would enable their organizations.”

As AI agents assume ownership of more complex and integral tasks, the distribution of roles and responsibilities within an organization will undergo significant change. It’s estimated that three-quarters of current roles will require redesign, reskilling, or redeployment by 2030 as a result of agentic AI.

For leadership, this shift should be about reskilling employees toward higher-value work in order to optimize the potential of an agent-human hybrid workforce, says Jayaswal.

For example, Wipro is a complex organization of 240,000 employees across 65 countries. It previously had multiple policies, documents, and knowledge fragmented across different systems, which delayed response to employee queries.

But the company has recently integrated a custom agentic AI assistant—an agent co-created in partnership with enterprise agentic AI platform Ema Unlimited—that can swiftly navigate this complex system, assuming responsibility for 50 HR tasks that had previously fallen to human employees. With the help of an AI agent, average response time to queries has lowered from 48 hours to five seconds.