From employees to agents: how AI is quietly reshaping your organisation

Two really insightful reports published in the second half of April paint a clear picture of what's coming next for business. Microsoft WorkLabs’s Work Trend Index 2025: The Year the Frontier Firm Is Born and Professor Jules White’s AI Labor Playbook both point to the same shift: AI is no longer just a tool. It’s becoming a workforce.

This matters, because it fundamentally changes what it means to lead, manage, and upskill an organisation. The big question is no longer, “What AI tool should we buy?”. Instead it’s, “How do we lead teams where some of the employees aren’t human?”

I help organisations prepare for exactly this kind of shift, and it’s fascinating to see two reports from authoritative sources drop in the same week.

• Microsoft’s WorkLab is a team of researchers looking into AI and the future of work. They produce regular research reports of the trends they are seeing in the way that people are working within Microsoft and in their customer organisations.

• Professor Jules White, from Vanderbilt university, is the Director of Vanderbil’s Initiative on the Future of Learning and Generative AI. His AI courses on Coursera have been taken by half a million students (and personally, I rate them as some of the best and most pragmatic I’ve taken)

And having studies both reports, and the differences and similarities, here's what you need to know.

Human-agent teams: not the future, but the present

Microsoft describes the rise of the Frontier Firm – organisations where humans and AI agents work side-by-side. They're faster, leaner, and able to scale knowledge work on demand. They don't restructure based on function – they restructure around work.

Jules White goes further, arguing that organisations need to think of AI as labour, not software. Prompts are job assignments. Tokens are the currency of output. And managing this new AI workforce is no different from managing people – it requires training, oversight, and leadership.

The idea of “every employee becoming an agent boss” isn’t a gimmick. It’s a necessity.

What's changing?

• Managers become AI orchestrators
  Leaders are being asked to manage AI-powered teams. That includes hiring (selecting the right models), onboarding (training them for specific tasks), and performance management (reviewing and improving outputs). If your managers aren’t ready to supervise AI labour, your organisation isn’t ready.

• Every role is becoming hybrid
  Whether it’s customer service, compliance, finance or product design, agents are already being used to handle repetitive, cognitive tasks. Employees need to know when to delegate to AI, how to prompt effectively, and how to course-correct when things go off track.

• Architecture becomes strategy
  White makes a critical point: the way your IT systems are set up dictates who you can “hire” as AI labour, what they can do, and how well they work. If your AI agents are locked inside individual tools, you’re not building a team – you’re building silos.

What this means for upskilling and culture

Organisational readiness in the AI age isn’t just about technical skills. It’s about cultural and strategic adaptability. Here’s what forward-thinking companies are doing:

• Shifting the mindset from efficiency to amplification
  The goal isn’t to reduce headcount. It’s to do more, with the same people – and give them the time and tools to focus on higher-value work.

• Training everyone, not just IT
  Every employee should be trained to work with AI: how to prompt well, how to refine outputs, and how to collaborate with digital teammates.

• Creating space for experimentation
  AI’s value often comes from unexpected places. Organisations that encourage exploration – not just compliance – get better results, faster.

• Redesigning workflows, not just plugging in AI
  Adding AI to broken processes won’t fix them. Leaders need to rethink workflows entirely – and often need new metrics like the human-agent ratio to get it right.

A quiet revolution is underway

We’re entering a phase of rapid reorganisation – not by departments, but by tasks and capabilities. AI isn’t replacing people. But it is forcing every organisation to ask: how will we work when we’re not the only ones doing the work?

At Stratentia, we help organisations answer that question by blending culture change, upskilling, and systems thinking. Because if your people aren’t ready to lead AI, your organisation won’t be ready to scale it.

Let’s talk.
If you’re exploring how to upskill your workforce and prepare your leadership for an AI-powered future, get in touch. The tools are here. The strategy is what makes the difference.