Rethinking organizational design in the age of agentic AI

Amid rapidly growing adoption of enterprise-level AI agents, there’s a disconnect emerging between ambition and execution. Although 85% of organizations say they want to be agentic within the next three years, 76% say their current operations and infrastructure can’t support that change. They cite a lack of readiness across people, processes, and workflows.

The challenge is that many organisations are often layering AI agents onto existing operations, rather than reimagine the operating model and how work will need to be rewired, explains Prasun Shah, global CTO for workforce consulting and chief AI officer at PwC UK Consulting. “They’re embedding AI employees into what is a human operating model,” layering on AI agents to existing workplace structures when “this is like adding sticky tapes to parts of an operating model that is breaking.” Doing so may be preventing organizations from unlocking the full value agentic AI offers, creating circumstances where disillusionment can quickly creep in. That full value lies in agents’ capacity to execute entire workflows with limited human input.

They can coordinate complex tasks, make independent decisions, adjust to changing conditions, and iterate performance. In early proving grounds that span customer service, HR, and sales, it’s already estimated that AI agents could accelerate business processes by as much as 30% to 50% and low-value work time by 25% to 40% when deployed at scale. But with this capability comes greater complexity and the need for an enterprise-wide change.

Enterprise agentic AI platform Ema describes this change as agentic business transformation (ABT), a term it coined last year in partnership with HFS Research, in an attempt to plug what it sees as a gap in the existing lexicon about AI agents, and to provide enterprises with a new framework with which to think about their own adoption of the technology. “None of the existing vocabulary captures the full scope of the change,” explains Ema CEO and founder Surojit Chatterjee. “Digital transformation was about moving from paper to software.

AI transformation was about adding artificial intelligence to existing processes. Co-pilot is about AI assisting in various human tasks. But ABT is something categorically different: It’s the integration of AI agents into the fabric of the organization.” For Shah, the dedicated term (ABT) “helps drive the need to redesign an organization in its entirety: its operating model, its workflows, decision rights, and performance management systems.” He emphasizes that “everything that’s needed to ensure those agents are actually active participants in value creation, rather than just point tools or productivity aids.” According to Ema, ABT encompasses three core pillars: an organization’s technology stack, its workforce, and the metrics used for success.