How to rebuild the enterprise for the Age of Agentic AI

I’ve sat in over fifty AI workshops this year with some of the world’s largest, most complex organizations. There’s always a moment when the room goes quiet. A team watches one of their own workflows run end-to-end with a single instruction to an AI agent. Their 13-step market commentary process or a claims process that takes six weeks is reduced to minutes.

The realization hits fast: agentic AI is no longer a promising capability; it's a real, on-demand collaborator working alongside your team today.

It’s thrilling, but it’s disorienting. Century-old enterprises weren’t built for this velocity. With their rigid processes, governance designed around humans making every decision and leadership playbooks for managing high-cost execution, the enterprise starts to crack. Without a new operating model, even the most promising proofs of concept can't scale.

The urgent question now is how to rebuild the enterprise around agentic AI. This is not a technical project for your CIO. It's a full re-architecture, squarely in the hands of leadership.

We’ve been on the ground as these transformations unfold and a blueprint is taking shape: redesign how work gets done and build a foundation of trust that allows people and systems to collaborate at scale.

This first shift is about the work itself – what we do and how we do it.

The enterprise was designed for a world where execution was the primary constraint. Today, execution is cheap, abundant and instantaneous. Now the constraint is orchestration. Work must flow simply and cleanly across teams.

Here’s what we see consistently working:

Grab your whiteboard and sticky notes and ask your teams: What is the true outcome of this workflow? Circle the steps that are essential and mark those that exist purely as organizational muscle memory – duplicate requests, redundant checks, legacy forms. You’ll find yourself asking, “How did this survive for 20 years?”

Remove organizational drag. Once you see the real flow of work, help it move across teams without friction. The biggest delays aren’t inside a task; they’re between tasks. Look for the moments where work gets stuck – legal approval for a campaign, financial signoff on a contract. Replace the endless 'check-ins' with a single, accountable owner and let an agent handle the routing.

Agentic AI shifts human value beyond old-school productivity (tasks executed, hours logged). AI can do that work instantly. Roles need to evolve towards directing work. Start by identifying the tasks an agent can take on, then reorient your people around the outcome behind those tasks. That marketing analyst spending 60% of their time pulling data becomes a ‘revenue impact strategist,’ with agents building dashboards while they guide ad spend or surface insights.

Career ladders assume that depth in a single task equals success. In the agentic AI era, the people who thrive are systems thinkers – those who can design, direct and improve agent-driven workflows. Anchor growth to expanding into new adjacencies, not mastering one domain. Sideways becomes the new upward. Create an environment where a social media manager learning prompt design becomes a content architect or a financial analyst understanding workflow logic pivots into revenue operations.

This is the new radically simple enterprise: more adaptive, more capable, more human in the work that matters most.

Redesigning your organization is only half the work. Building trust is the other.

Enterprise governance systems were built for deterministic tools with predictable rules, not agentic systems that interpret context and act. Manual oversight might work for five agents, but it won’t work for five hundred. Scaling requires a new paradigm.

You can’t just comply your way into this. Trust is structural, human and needs to be part of your day-one architecture. This is the critical, second half of the blueprint:

We see it every day – if IT teams can’t see what an agent did or why it did it, trust collapses. Put real observability and supervision in place – audit trails and behaviour logs – so every action is traceable and explainable and business teams can innovate securely, safely and at scale. Be explicit with your vendors: transparency is non-negotiable.

Your responsibility assignment framework falls apart the moment agents take action. Get specific about boundaries – what agents can handle on their own, what needs a human green light and what remains human-only – and map clear escalation paths. Set policy rules, role-based access and permissioning so agents operate in lanes.

Your teams aren’t afraid of AI, they’re afraid of not knowing how they fit in. Don’t turn away from discomfort, face it head-on: what work goes away, what becomes hybrid and what still depends on our uniquely human qualities, such as judgement, creativity and intuition. A five-slide deck won’t cut it here. Formalize it. Create a new operating agreement with shared expectations, clear division of labour and a firm definition of what 'good' looks like. Frameworks like the Agentic Compact can help guide your strategy.

When trust is built into your systems from day one, your enterprise moves with AI – not against it.

Once execution and trust are no longer barriers, the question becomes: What are you brave enough to build?

What felt impossible now feels inevitable. A retailer can stand up a full storefront around a micro-trend in 72 hours. A wealth management firm can deliver personalized investment strategies to millions, not just clients with seven figures. A life sciences organization could compress three years of drug development into months, bringing life-saving medicines to patients faster than ever thought possible.

Teams finally have the space to think bigger, move faster and tackle problems they’ve been punting for years.

Get the foundation right – the leadership, the operating model, the trust – and suddenly the whole enterprise opens up.