The debate over how to integrate AI agents into the workplace has produced no shortage of frameworks, mandates, and org-chart overhauls. And this week at Fortune’s COO Summit, it produced something rarer: complete, 180-degree disagreement between two executives who have thought about this longer than almost anyone, and still left with no clean resolution.
Eric Kelleher, President and COO of Okta, has named the agents on his team Leo, Sloan, Hank, and Walker (among others). They show up in business reviews alongside his human staff. The turning point, he said, came during a standup when he asked staff to give names to their own agents. “In that exercise, AI became a colleague as opposed to a tool,” he told Fortune on the sidelines of the panel, “and that catalyst is valuable.”
Francine Katsoudas, the Executive Vice President and Chief People, Policy & Purpose Officer at Cisco, heard something like that and pushed back hard. “I would not look at AI as a colleague,” she told a separate audience at the COO Summit just hours later. “I think we should look at AI and agents as part of the workflow, but not a colleague. And I think the sooner we land that, the more confident our people will be.”
