For successful AI adoption, managers should focus on a different movie to drive transformation

In Terminator, an all-powerful, faultless AI becomes sentient, decides that humans are the enemy, and sets off a nuclear apocalypse. In Fantasia’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Mickey Mouse puts a spell on a broom to make it do his work. The broom goes rogue, continually pouring buckets of water into an overflowing well. When Mickey smashes the broom, each piece becomes a new water-fetching runaway robot. He almost drowns before the sorcerer stops the catastrophe.

You see the difference? We can worry about an AI apocalypse, but the real danger is runaway swarms of badly-run agentic systems creating chaos as they mishandle ordinary workplace tasks. Agentic messup started small, with hallucinations or bad advice from chatbots. More recently, AI researchers have observed that unchecked agentic systems can develop dangerous behaviors, even sending threatening emails to humans who stand in the way of their completing their tasks.

This doesn’t mean we need to stop. I’m a great believer in AI, and for more than a year, my company has made important early contributions to making agentic systems perform better. I do believe, however, that we need to think about how to work effectively with AI magic, considering both the right kinds of software robots and the work they should and shouldn’t be doing.

The well-trained sorcerer

For the most part, the initial sorcerers who make agentic AI a workplace standard will be chief information officers, chief technology officers, and businesspeople who have a deep understanding of technology. This is in line with a decades-long trend of business processes working with increasingly sophisticated computation, with important differences.

Businesses have been through periods of widespread automation, with computers within companies mapping and recording activities such as sales campaigns and using enterprise resources effectively. CIOs kept up on the latest hardware and software. Then came digital transformation, turning on-premises work such as marketing, commerce, or HR into digital services, often rented via remote cloud computing. Companies like Salesforce, Marketo, and Workday flourished, while CIOs built a portfolio of services for their companies to consume.

Now, as agentic systems do more work directly, CIOs need to become adept at understanding business processes across their organizations, while helping business leaders across different parts of the organization develop their skills.

The new job of business-savvy techies and tech-savvy business people is to work with the CEO and figure out the best ways for agents to work across every line of business. They examine workflows and ways people do things within that organization’s culture. They determine which parts can safely and effectively be automated by agents, and how people should work with these agents.

The era of high-touch automation

Generic chatbots are a fine but low-value corporate tool. Real value in agentic AI comes from applying proprietary corporate data and injecting an understanding of the corporate culture and processes into an agent, both internally and with external suppliers, partners, and customers. Much like a new employee, the agent must digest internal data and local rules, such as the threshold for when a purchase order requires managerial approval.

The rules governing security and governance are particularly important, as they help reduce the risk of catastrophic error. Agents need the capability to record and explain their actions, providing people with awareness of what the agent is doing and an audit trail to prove that the business rules are followed.

Rubrik is one of several companies making this a reality. Drawing on our core strengths in corporate security and continuous uptime, we’ve developed ways to quickly incorporate large amounts of high-value, secured data into an agile system. We’ve worked on faster AI workflows, security, and governance systems. Much remains to do, but the progress we’re seeing, at Rubrik and elsewhere, is gratifying.

The future still belongs to humans

One challenge is optimizing how people, from entry-level employees to the most senior executives, work best with agents. The sorcerer’s job is not to run things for them, like a supervised Mickey Mouse, but to create intuitive systems that help people add things AI can’t do. These are tasks of intuition, taste, imagination, human empathy and connection, and everything else that goes into spurring customer loyalty and moving the company forward.

AI is trained on existing data, AKA the past. That makes some prediction possible, but only for a future that mimics the past, without real breakthroughs in products, services, or ways of working. That’s the human factor, supercharged by the new sorcerers, who enable and promote new skills across the workforce.

These leaders have to find their own new ways to add human value to what they do. This includes finding new ways to bring in entry-level employees, who used to learn high-value knowledge of corporate culture and data through work, and agents will now be doing. These young people are still essential, not least because they are likely to be the most AI-savvy employees.