Companies have spent the past two years teaching employees how to use AI. Most of that training has focused on the basics, such as prompting skills. It has helped people become comfortable with AI and begin to see its value. But that level of interaction is only the beginning, and it will not hold up as AI systems become more autonomous.
The newest generation of AI systems is not simply waiting for instructions. Agents now pursue goals, call tools, make recommendations, trigger actions, and hand work from one system to another. The human role changes with them: the employee is no longer simply a user but the person responsible for directing and overseeing the agent. As Gianpaolo Barozzi, Cisco’s 3P CTO, explains, “Agentic AI changes the relationship between people and technology. It requires new ways of setting boundaries, calibrating trust, and maintaining human accountability.”
Most companies are not training for that. They are teaching people how to get more out of AI. They are not teaching people how to lead it. This is becoming one of the most important capability gaps in the next phase of enterprise AI. Without that management discipline, employees may grant agents more trust and autonomy than the work or the technology warrants.
