From performance reviews to pink slips, managing AI agents looks a lot like managing people
The workforce is no longer purely human — and closing the gap between how companies manage people and how they govern AI agents has become one of the defining operational challenges of the digital worker lifecycle.
As agentic AI spreads across every facet of the enterprise, IBM Corp. is betting that the same management rigor applied to human employees must now extend to digital workers. The core of that thesis is the digital worker lifecycle — a structured approach to hiring, credentialing, deploying and retiring AI agents with the same discipline organizations that has long governed people management, according to Mohamad Ali (pictured), senior vice president and head of IBM Consulting at IBM. That perspective started when IBM CEO Arvind Krishna charged Ali with building a software layer capable of managing human and digital workers side by side.
“Arvind called me and we had a conversation about three years ago and he said, ‘I want you to come over and I want you to be a consulting business,'” Ali said. “‘What is digital labor? It’s a whole bunch of bits of software. I need you to come in and I need you to build this set of software and do it in a way that it could be managed. You could think of this as HR management … but now you have to HR manage human workers and digital workers.'”
