AI Agents: The New Digital Workers
Increasingly, we hear about AI agents being the new "digital workers" — a concept that arose before agentic or generative AI hit the mainstream in areas such as robotic process automation. Digital workers are designed to serve the discipline and obedience, but just like human workers, they, too, have their quirks.
Augmenting Teams with Digital Labor
Major organizations are leveraging digital labor platforms to augment their teams with digital workers, the vendor added. Talent is scarce and expensive to train, so organizations are turning to AI to help with customer interactions and deal with workflow backlogs, but can no longer afford "inadequate solutions that provide generic responses," Salesforce stated.
Autonomous Digital Workers
Autonomous digital workers can now perform such work at many levels, industry leaders agree. "The convergence of skilled innovators, rapidly-deployable cloud tools, customer awareness and executive support has created an ideal environment for agentic AI to thrive in 2025," Chris Bennett, director of AI transparency and education at Motorola Solutions, told ZDNET.
AI Agents Need to be Thoughtfully Managed
At the same time, AI agents need to be thoughtfully managed, just as is the case with human work, and there’s work to be done before an agentic AI-driven workforce can truly assume a broad range of tasks. "While the promise of agentic AI is evident, we are several years away from widespread agentic AI adoption at the enterprise level," said Scott Beechuk, partner with Norwest Venture Partners.
The AI Systems Engineer
This may boost an emerging human-centered role — the AI systems engineer. "This new quality assurance and oversight role will become essential to enterprises as they manage and continuously optimize AI agents," Beechuk said.
Conclusion
Companies and tech teams may be "well-positioned to support agentic AI, but we still need time and experience to strike the right balance between agentic and human workflows," Bennett advised. "Our advice is to view AI as an augmentation to human experts, not a replacement."
FAQs
Q: What is the role of AI agents in the digital workforce?
A: AI agents are designed to serve the discipline and obedience, but just like human workers, they, too, have their quirks.
Q: What are the benefits of using digital labor platforms?
A: Digital labor platforms enable "a limitless workforce through AI agents for any department, assembled using a new library of pre-built skills, and that can take action across any system or workflow."
Q: What are the challenges of managing AI agents?
A: AI agents need to be thoughtfully managed, just as is the case with human work, and there’s work to be done before an agentic AI-driven workforce can truly assume a broad range of tasks.
Q: What is the role of the AI systems engineer?
A: The AI systems engineer is a new quality assurance and oversight role that will become essential to enterprises as they manage and continuously optimize AI agents.
