According to Inc, most executives are making the same fundamental error with AI that companies made in the early web days – treating it as decoration rather than infrastructure. They’re adding chatbots and automated reports as features rather than rethinking their entire business model around artificial intelligence. The crucial distinction lies between automation and agency: automation makes existing tasks more efficient, while agency involves delegating decision-making to systems that can coordinate actions across functions. Product strategist Connor Davis argues that every great company will soon have an “agentic layer” that orchestrates tasks across functions rather than just automating them. This shift demands new governance models with clear ethical boundaries and oversight mechanisms to ensure AI decisions remain auditable and explainable.
The subtle but profound difference
Here’s the thing that most companies are missing: automation and agency sound similar but operate completely differently. Automation is your basic efficiency play – doing the same tasks faster or cheaper. But agency? That’s the real game-changer. It’s about delegation, where systems actually make decisions, coordinate actions, and manage other software on your behalf.
Think about it this way: when your finance team uses an LLM to summarize quarterly reports, that’s automation. Useful, sure. But when that same system proactively flags anomalies, adjusts forecasts, and alerts the CFO with recommendations? That’s agency. And that’s where the real transformation happens.
AI as the new middleware
Andrew Bolis nailed it when he said AI will become the orchestration layer across every SaaS tool. Right now, humans are the middleware in most organizations – jumping between CRMs, spreadsheets, and dashboards, copying data manually. Tomorrow’s agentic layer will handle all that grunt work automatically, turning disconnected enterprise systems into what the article calls “adaptive organisms.”
This mirrors exactly what happened with APIs. First came isolated web applications, then APIs connected them. Now AI agents will do the connecting… and the deciding too. The companies that get this are already reorganizing around it. They’re not just adding AI to workflows – they’re building workflows around AI.
Why trust matters more than speed
Now here’s where it gets tricky. The temptation is to delegate everything to these AI agents. I mean, if they can optimize marketing spend, manage supply chains, and handle code deployment, why not let them run wild? The answer is simple but crucial: trust has to be earned, not automated.
AI agents absolutely must be auditable. Their decisions need to be explainable and reversible. Without that, you risk falling into the “black box syndrome” that’s already causing problems in large-scale AI deployments. Agentic systems are particularly dangerous because they don’t crash – they just comply. And that compliance can lead to some pretty scary outcomes if you’re not careful. Remember the paperclip maximizer thought experiment? That’s the kind of unintended consequence you get when systems optimize for the wrong goals.
Where people still matter
The best AI-first companies aren’t automating everything indiscriminately. They’re building human-in-the-loop architectures where humans remain the moral and strategic governors while AI handles execution at scale. The manager of the near future won’t just oversee people – they’ll coordinate agents.
So what’s the competitive advantage in the AI era? It’s not about having the biggest model or the most GPUs. It’s about organizational adaptability – the ability to incorporate AI decision-making without losing accountability. Companies that treat AI as infrastructure will compress decision cycles from weeks to hours. Those that don’t? They’ll be moving at human speed while their competitors operate at machine speed.
Basically, AI is no longer the icing on the product – it’s the yeast in the dough. It changes everything from the inside out. The agentic future isn’t coming: it’s already here. The only question is whether your company is ready to stop piloting and start delegating.
