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Managers manage people, processes and problems. In the coming year, one of the biggest processes they will have to address is agentic artificial intelligence. It will have an impact on the people they work with, solve but also create problems and powerfully affect the nature of management itself.
Attention has shifted in workplaces from the quick wins AI has offered by summarizing meetings and serving as a writing and research assistant to allowing it greater scope and licence to act on its own on our behalf. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, highlighted this possibility in his January book Superagency, written with journalist Greg Beato; Salesforce has been the most notable, activist pioneer with its AgentForce customer service offering; and now as the year closes, in a bookend, Canada’s longtime authority on technology, Don Tapscott, is welcoming us to “The Age of Identic AI,” in You to the Power of Two, written with futurist Joseph M. Bradley.
“Technology is no longer a tool. It is an infinite extension of you and your human potential. Not merely your duplicate but your exponential force: You to the power of two,” they write.
The AI most of us have been playing with the past few years is passive, responding to our prompts. Agentic AI – or in their preferred term, identic AI – is proactive, understanding and even anticipating our needs. They refer to it as a “digital consigliere, a knowledgeable, intelligent and capable extension of yourself.” It knows you and your habits, preferences and priorities.
“Unlike traditional AI copilots that assist with tasks only, an identic agent could negotiate contracts, initiate high stakes business strategies and collaborate with other AI systems. It would function as a partner, shaping outcomes with the foresight and adaptability of a seasoned executive,” they explain.
They call it Identic AI because at the heart of this transformation is a fundamental shift in the nature of identity. “Who are you? How do you see yourself? How do you present yourself to the world?” they ask. That is daunting, particularly for managers. How much of the people-processes-problems that you handle could be swallowed up by this agent? Will you even have people to manage (and since you are a person somebody else manages, is there any room for you in the equation)?
They see leaders managing teams that consist of human workers and their agents. In effect, our digital agents become team members, offering insights and executing tasks just like their human counterparts. “But unlike humans, digital agents require no rest, have no emotional needs and work at lightening speed. Leaders must navigate the unique dynamics of managing such hybrid teams, ensuring that agents enhance human performance rather than overshadow it,” they say.
Organizations will flatten further, they believe, as AI takes over many of the tasks traditionally handled by middle management. Instead of acting as intermediaries between top leadership and frontline employees, middle managers must evolve to become specialists in areas where human skills are still essential.
They fall back to a sports analogy: The CEO is the head coach and middle managers are the specialized coaches who focus on specific aspects of the game, such as the offensive or defensive coach. Managers would claim responsibility for AI oversight, ensuring that AI systems function as intended and their outputs align with the organization’s strategic goals. “In other words, middle management is where AI-enabled execution meets human interpretation and creativity,” they say.
Most managers have staffers they turn to first – people they like and trust. They also have people they devote more attention to, out of friendship, priorities or the individual’s need for assistance. One significant challenge Messrs. Tapscott and Bradley foresee is ensuring human workers feel valued and essential in an environment where AI often outperform them in certain tasks.
Their approach is echoed by two executives at Salesforce, Vala Afshar and Henry King, in their book Autonomous. They note that today’s CEOs are the final generation of executives leading exclusively human workforces. Obviously the same is true of today’s managers more generally: Wave goodbye to what you have been doing.
“Integrating AI agents into daily operations will become a leadership skill that separates companies that thrive from those that fall behind,” they predict. Say hello to your future – your task list for 2026. But what should be on it?
They highlight the importance of relationships. Workplaces would be nothing without relationships; everything is built from them. Yet relationship design is not something the leadership literature talks about. “We leave the kinds of relationships we get, with our employees, our customers, our business partners, somewhat to chance, hoping that we’ll just get along,” they write. Now we must shape relationships, in a more complicated dance between machine and humans.
As we move ahead, they also believe two human qualities will be essential: Curiosity and imagination.
Curiosity is the engine that drives exploration beyond predetermined parameters. “While AI systems can process vast amounts of information and identify patterns within existing datasets, they cannot independently develop the wonder that leads to breakthrough questions,” the Salesforce executives write.
Imagination, they note, asks fundamentally different questions than curiosity. Curiosity asks “what if we explored that further?” while imagination asks “what if this were completely different?”
While curiosity seeks to understand existing patterns, imagination conjures up entirely new patterns. The imaginative mind approaches AI as a partner in exploring possibilities. “The visionary quality enables humans to guide AI toward possibilities that wouldn’t emerge from data analysis alone,” they write.
So yes, managers manage people, processes and problems. But they bring to it curiosity and imagination and, in a world of agentic AI, that may make all the difference.
Cannonballs
Consultant Robyn Bolton says the media and others miss the point when they search for and celebrate courageous leadership. Often organization progress is not deterred by leaders lacking culture but by structures and processes. Four examples: Compensation structures tied to short-term metrics; risk management processes designed to say “no”; approval hierarchies where one skeptic can overrule 10 enthusiasts and cultures where failed experiments end careers.New research suggests founders who depend on investment from parents, family members or close friends are less likely to take risks and grow their business more slowly than when funding comes from an outside source such as venture capital firms or angel investors. Brian Baik, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, says they fear squandering their parents’ and friends’ money. Hitting middle age and feeling stuck in her job as an Emmy-winning TV news anchor, Lu Ann Cahn set out to do something new every day for a year. Change consultant Greg Satell notes she found that the simple act of doing something different – even just taking a different route to work – rewires and refreshes your brain. So when you’re stuck, do something new or different.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.