A Glimpse of the Near Future
Picture this: it’s 2028. Just about five years after generative AI (GenAI) first took center stage in almost all boardroom discussions. AI agents are everywhere—sending reminders, doing follow-ups, capturing interests, resolving queries, spotting errors—running 24/7, freeing up significant human time. They don’t just handle the grunt work, they’re also active in brainstorming sessions, coming up with innovative ideas tuned to real business needs. Executives now lean on synthetic advisors to audit performance and help set long-term strategy. It’s taken months of data clean-up, robust governance, empathetic leadership, agile tech adoption, and human-centered design to get here. Everything has changed from how business-as-usual used to be. But the turning point was clear: it all started when businesses realized the need to reimagine their structures through the lens of agentic AI.
The AI-First Reset Begins Now
Rewind to today. We’re standing at that inflection point. 2025 marked a tectonic change in how organizations operate. To harness the full potential of AI, people must get comfortable with letting AI agents take on part of their work and even some of their decisions. But this isn’t about losing ground. It’s about expanding it. AI doesn’t take a bigger slice of the pie—it helps us make a bigger pie. Humans, along with AI, can forge a symbiotic partnership that can allow humans to expand the horizons of work from where it is today.
That gives humans more space to do what only we can: think critically, connect emotionally, and create meaning. Monotonous, repetitive work was never our highest calling—and now we can finally leave it to the machines. As AI agents make inroads into the core of business at a breakneck speed, the shape and fabric of organizations are undergoing a fundamental shift.
What the AI-First Workplace Looks Like
The Great Flattening
Traditional management layers are collapsing. According to Gartner®, “through 2026, 20% of organizations will use AI to flatten their organizational structure, eliminating more than half of current middle management positions.”1 As AI starts to automate most of the repeatable tasks, and provide visibility across the business, it reduces the need for layers of oversight. This is flattening the pyramid structures across organizations, improving the speed of decision-making and productivity.
Molecularization and Deconstruction of Tasks
Flattening the org structure doesn’t necessarily mean eliminating managers, but rather eliminating some of the activities undertaken by managers. AI doesn’t just automate; it deconstructs. Complex roles are broken down into a set of “molecularized” micro-tasks. Each of these micro-tasks can then be either automated or allocated to a specialized human role or an AI agent. Essentially, humans get involved in more specialized, creative, emotional, or strategic micro-tasks, while AI agents handle the rest. This deconstructs the traditional routine mandated by the role and lets individuals expand beyond rigid job descriptions, thus expanding the pie of work, while still sharing a good portion of it with AI.
The Inevitable Role Merge
As managers venture beyond the traditional job functions, to focus more on strategic work and people development, the functional boundaries across teams and divisions blur. This inspires individuals and teams to break down silos and imbibe the culture of one team across the organization. Naturally, the roles across the teams are bound to overlap and merge with each other. For example, Moderna famously merged its HR and IT departments, appointing a single leader, as AI began to influence both domains.
Orchestrating Complexity
Blended human-AI workplaces are complex. As roles across divisions merge, there’s a need to sense, comprehend, understand, resolve, collaborate, coordinate, and manage diverse sets of tasks across departments. This complexity is exacerbated by the reality that orchestration doesn’t just involve people across functions, but also fleets of specialized AI agents across these functions. The role would be quite demanding, with a need to have AI proficiency to manage a cross-functional AI-human workforce, and a sense of logic, ethical judgment, and communication skills to break the silos created by human hierarchies and mindsets.
The Rise of Soft Skills
When AI takes over the technical grind, the spotlight shifts to human strengths: empathy, emotional intelligence, and critical thinking. The focus switches from finding the data to storytelling—explaining what the data means to the relevant stakeholders. In this context, soft skills become organizational gold. By 2030, as much as 30% of work activities could be automated, but social and emotional skills centered on collaboration, communication, adaptability, and empathy will increase significantly in demand.2
Collaborative Learning Environment
For AI to keep getting smarter, humans need to keep teaching it. Without continuous inputs, AI responses are prone to develop biases or miss contextual subtilities. While AI agents can see patterns from raw data, it’s humans who can respond with empathy and context. It’s imperative that humans impart continuous knowledge arising out of new uncertainties and changing environments, so that AI agents gradually improve over time. In this regard, businesses need to create an environment that lets humans and AI agents co-evolve with each other, with continuous learning and feedback.
Human-centered design practices have always unlocked value to businesses by placing users at the center of design. This now extends to AI agents as well, with one more layer of complexity added. It’s still very much about placing humans at the center, but now considerations also involve how humans feed AI agents, how AI agents understand human context, and how the insights provided are loaded with a sense of purpose to empower humans in the ecosystem. At the end of the day, smart AI agents need smart humans to function, and smart humans need smart AI agents to function. A perfect symbiotic relationship.
The AI-First Future Is Now
AI isn’t just knocking on the door—it’s already inside, transforming work at its core. Not replacing humans, but unleashing them. Machines take on the monotonous, leaving us to lean into our creativity, empathy, and strategy. The pie isn’t shrinking—it’s expanding exponentially, and those who embrace AI today will be the architects of tomorrow’s frontier. Because the AI-first era isn’t just another business trend. It’s the great organizational reset.
1 Gartner Press Release, “Gartner Unveils Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2025 and Beyond,” October 22, 2024. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-10-22-gartner-unveils-top-predictions-for-it-organizations-and-users-in-2025-and-beyond.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
2 “Generative AI and the future of work in America,” McKinsey Global Institute, July 26, 2023.
