Managing AI Agents Like Employees: 6 Processes To Rethink

Imagine you’re working with an AI agent on a customer proposal. It retrieves the figures you need, updates the presentation and prepares the follow-up. But when you review the final offer, you discover that someone else on your team asked the agent to change the terms. And it did.

Who gave it permission to do that? The colleague who gave the instruction? You, because you’re responsible for the proposal? The manager who owns the customer relationship? Or the person whose account connects the agent to the company’s systems?

Organizations have spent decades developing processes to answer questions like these for their human workforce. Hiring establishes who can join and at what cost. Onboarding provides context. Roles define responsibilities. Managers set expectations, review performance and decide when someone is ready for more responsibility. But what happens when the work is increasingly performed by people and AI agents together?

Cisco’s recent WebexOne announcements illustrate why this question is becoming urgent. The company described agents that employees could invite into team conversations to retrieve information and act across connected applications. As agents become accessible through the tools people already use, they increasingly participate in everyday work. Technology controls may determine what they can access, but organizations still need to decide what they are authorized to do and who is responsible.

Applying familiar workforce management processes to AI agents may seem like a logical next step. But the idea has already generated controversy. In July 2024, Lattice announced plans to introduce digital worker employee records, bringing AI agents into organizational charts with goals and managers. Following a backlash, the company abandoned the plan three days later.