While headlines focus on the distant future of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the decisive shift for business is happening right now. That shift is agentic AI, and it's transforming how every employee works.
This is AI that moves beyond answering questions to understanding a goal, making a plan, and taking actions across applications to achieve it with human guidance and oversight. The result? Employees who can accomplish 10 times more than before, not by working harder, but by orchestrating teams of specialized AI agents.
From Instructions to Intent: The New Human-Computer Interface
For decades, computing has been instruction-based. You tell the computer exactly what to do: analyse this spreadsheet, develop that code, send this email. Every action requires explicit human direction.
2026 marks the shift to intent-based computing. Instead of specifying steps, employees state desired outcomes, and the computer, using LLMs and agents, determines how to deliver them.
What This Means
AI is one of the first technologies that applies to every single person, in both personal and professional lives. Its power lies in augmenting human capacity with better recall, faster data processing, and enhanced reasoning across the back office, front office, and corner office.
The New Role: Human Supervisor of Agents
In this new model, every employee, from an entry-level analyst to a senior vice president, becomes a human supervisor of agents. Their primary job is no longer to perform every mundane task personally, but to orchestrate a team of specialized AI agents to achieve a goal.
The Role Transformation
What changes when you become an agent orchestrator
Traditional Role
- Perform every task personally
- Manual data gathering & analysis
- Linear, sequential workflow
- Limited by individual capacity
- Reactive to information needs
10x Employee Role
- Orchestrate specialized agents
- Automated insights delivery
- Parallel, multi-agent execution
- Multiplied by agent capabilities
- Proactive intelligence 24/7
This model is about more than just delegation, it's about augmentation. The real power comes from giving every employee agents grounded in the company's own enterprise context: its internal systems, knowledge bases, customer data, and past work.
The Four Core Responsibilities of the 10x Employee
The employee's core function becomes providing strategic direction. Their new responsibilities are:
Delegate Tasks
Identify which tasks are best suited for an agent and assign them. Not everything should be automated, knowing when to delegate is a crucial skill.
Set Goals
Clearly define the desired outcome for the agent. The clearer the goal, the better the agent performs. This requires outcome-oriented thinking.
Outline Strategy
Use human judgment to guide the agents and make the final, nuanced decisions that AI can't. Strategy remains uniquely human.
Verify Quality
Act as the final checkpoint for quality, accuracy, and tone. Human oversight ensures outputs align with values and standards.
By 2026, agents will manage complex, multi-step workflows across systems. A key responsibility of employees will be to set the strategy and oversee the system of agents responsible for tasks, such as invoicing and contracting.
Case Study: The 10x Marketing Manager
Let's see this in action. A marketing manager's job used to be a constant scramble of drafting posts, pulling data, and watching competitors. In 2026, they can orchestrate a system of specialized AI agents to achieve their goals, rather than performing every task personally.
The Marketing Manager's Agent System
Five specialized agents working in parallel
Data Agent
Sifts through millions of data points to find actionable patterns in market trends
Analyst Agent
Monitors trends, competitor announcements, and social sentiment 24/7
Content Agent
Drafts social media posts and blog articles in the company's brand voice
Creative Agent
Generates images and videos to accompany social posts
Reporting Agent
Pulls and analyses weekly campaign data with key insights
With agents focusing on specific tasks, the marketing manager can multiply their output by focusing on high-impact brand storytelling and strategic campaign development. The repetitive work happens automatically; the creative strategy remains human.
Where Organizations Are Deploying Agents
According to recent research, organizations with AI agents in production are deploying them across a wide range of use cases:
Customer Service
Handling inquiries, routing requests, resolving issues
Marketing & Security
Campaign automation, threat detection, compliance
Tech Support
Troubleshooting, documentation, ticket resolution
Product & Research
Innovation workflows, market research, prototyping
Real Results: The TELUS Story
"This surge in AI agent adoption reflects a fundamental mindset shift to recognizing it as a productivity instrument available 24/7. At TELUS, we've seen this firsthand."
Jaime Tatis, Chief AI Officer, TELUS
Similarly, Suzano, the world's largest pulp manufacturer, developed an AI agent to translate natural language questions into SQL code for querying materials data. The result? A 95% reduction in query time across 50,000 employees.
The Human Element: Why This Isn't About Replacement
There's a common misconception that agents act without control. The reality is exactly the opposite: humans remain the orchestrators and final decision-makers. Agents function as powerful assistants to augment human-centric workflows.
Take the media and entertainment industry, where agents can help in understanding vast amounts of complex content and data, and human creative and strategic thinking will remain critical to deciding which stories to tell, how to tell them, and how to fund and distribute them.
The ceiling for human achievement has been lifted. AI agents don't replace human judgment, they amplify it. They handle the repetitive, time-consuming tasks so humans can focus on what they do best: creative problem-solving, relationship building, and strategic decision-making.
The Skills Gap Challenge
This transformation creates a new challenge: the expertise to be an "agent orchestrator" simply doesn't exist in the market yet. As AI evolves, the skills gap is widening and it's getting harder for individuals and organisations to keep up.
The "half-life" of a professional skill is now four years, and in tech, as short as two years. This means organisations must move beyond simply buying technology and focus on building an AI-ready workforce.
What the Data Shows
- 82% of decision-makers agree that technical learning resources help their organisation stay ahead in AI
- 71% of organisations realize an increase in revenue since engaging with learning resources
- 84% of employees would like a greater organisational focus on AI
- Only 29% say that AI is broadly advocated across their organisations
The gap between employee desire and organizational support represents both a challenge and an opportunity.
Getting Started: Your Path to the 10x Organization
Three Steps to Transform Your Workforce
Audit Current Workflows
Identify tasks that are repetitive, data-intensive, or time-consuming. These are prime candidates for agent delegation.
Pilot with Power Users
Start with employees who are already comfortable with technology. Their success stories will drive broader adoption.
Invest in Upskilling
Train your workforce on prompt engineering, agent management, and outcome-oriented thinking. Make AI literacy a core competency.
The Bottom Line
The 10x employee isn't science fiction, it's happening now across industries and geographies. Companies that embrace this transformation are seeing measurable results: faster time-to-insight, higher quality outputs, and employees who are more engaged because they're focused on meaningful work.
The opportunity can seem technical, but it's fundamentally human. It's about freeing your teams from repetitive, low-value work that drains their energy, allowing them to focus on the creative, strategic, and empathetic work that only they can do.
This is your path to building a faster, smarter, and ultimately, more human company.
"Access to agentic AI capabilities will democratize insights, innovation, creativity, and business growth, bringing value to consumers, employees, and organisations. This opportunity is truly significant, but comes with tremendous responsibility to ensure that the promise of AI delivers secure, ethical, and fair outcomes for all."
Anil Jain, Global Managing Director, Google Cloud
