Boards of directors are going to have to operate at human speed in a world where everything is automated at machine scale, with agentic AI.

Corporations, and CEOs need to learn how to operate in and the agentic world.

Everyone will need agents across their standard systems of record like SAP Oracle, as well as their key applications, such as HR, CRM, etc.

One of the key lessons for the board is to be sure to challenge management to understand they are in a multi agent world and management should avoid getting locked into proprietary agents.

Standard large systems of record, like SAP, Workday, SalesForce, and even Microsoft will have proprietary agents that are optimized for their system only.

You need to avoid agentic lock in.  While these systems will provide an agentic framework we should make sure we preserve the ability to access our own data without being charged using outside agents.

We need to ask management to evaluate and select cross platform multi agent design architecture. There are some companies that are designing to be multi agent, such as Anthropic through its MCP framework, Google via A2A, Nvidia via Nemo, Boomi and the services companies for sure Deloitte, TCS, etc..

We must imagine a world in the future where there are multiple AI agents operating simultaneously. For example, we might have agents operating to identify fraud, cyber vulnerability, different agents to identify anti-money-laundering, different agents for accounts payable, different agents for account receivable…

This raises the obvious logical question of who is orchestrating all of these agents? What platform makes it easy for our IT leaders to navigate this new environment? There are some orchestration platforms, such as GCP, Boomi, (and ServiceNow acquired MoveWorks specifically for their a platform).

We need to integrate using agents into the obvious areas, we historically have outsourced like Finance, Account Payable / Receivable, HR , call-center support, procurement, etc.

The technology futurist, Ray Wang shared his views for example: think about how agentic can be used in our manufacturing process. GE Appliances out of Louisville Kentucky gets many of their components from China. In fact they are owned by Haier.  They have been using agentic AI to automate the removal of spyware, which is already embedded in some of the Chinese components in their supply chain and keep the product US based.

They are also using agentic AI to do simulations of digital twins when they design a product to see what will fit inside a given machine design for say a dishwasher or clothes washer/dryer.  They use AI to launch global campaigns which would have taken 5 to 6 months because of language and cultural requirements. Today that number can be as fast as 6 week.

We see innovative companies like Walmart, who has their floor sweeper at night go up and down the aisles of Sam’s club with an agentic integrated scanner built-in. The agentic scanner looks at the QR codes as it cleans the floor and identifies where inventory restocking needs to take place and integrates this back into the supply chain system for initiating the order and restock.

The large legacy companies who are well funded and have big scale operations like Walmart/Amazon are early adopters.

Established companies where we serve on boards need to be future proofing.

The new startups and born agentic/born AI companies will outmaneuver and create agentic born in solutions that are hugely cost-effective.

Legacy companies need to re-think their usually anticipated speed that these new companies will arrive on the scene, and impact them. Old metrics for example, of productivity per employee need to be reevaluated.

Renowned futurist Ray Wang mentioned a professional services firm called the Soul of the Machine Inc.  This is a start up where the average revenue per employee will reach $1M by end of year. Compare this against Accenture‘s productivity preemployment of $3-$400,000 per employee. It’s very easy to see how companies employing agentic AI are going to pull ahead in efficiency, productivity and profitability.

We need to be challenging thinking so that the companies we oversee remain competitive.

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