While many companies now use AI to improve individual tasks, most still struggle to apply it to the cross-functional work that makes or breaks enterprise performance. Drawing on field research at companies including Walmart, Amazon, Ericsson, Ramp, and Medtronic, the authors argue that the next frontier is agentic AI orchestration: systems that connect task-based AI tools and organizational workflows and solicit and integrate critical information that only humans have. In these systems, AI performs analyses, routes information, and surfaces trade-offs, while humans contribute context and tacit knowledge, set guardrails, and make the final calls. Organizations that redesign decisions around orchestrated human-AI collaboration can respond faster, leverage knowledge more effectively, and execute higher-quality enterprise decisions with greater speed and consistency.

AI agents don’t just speed up knowledge work; they change its nature. In a field study of Perplexity’s conversational assistant and autonomous agent, researchers found that not…

Chat starts to fail at enterprise scale when teams need to manage large volumes of AI-generated work together.