Agentic Organizations: The Reality of the Near Future
AI is driving a paradigm shift that is redefining how organizations are structured, how they adapt, how they make decisions, and how they create value. This new paradigm—soon to become reality—is the agentic organization.
In agentic organizations, the positioning of AI and the way organizations leverage AI capabilities will be fundamentally different from today’s common AI usage and AI-focused approaches. AI will no longer be limited to supporting, recommending, assisting, or enhancing automation. Instead, within defined principles, it will be positioned as a capability that understands goals, makes decisions, takes action, produces outcomes, and continuously improves through feedback—pushing organizations far beyond what they are accustomed to through autonomous agents.
In agentic organizations—where humans and virtual/physical AI agents work together, where AI agents take on operational responsibilities and humans focus on orchestration, and where the model shifts from “human in the loop” to “human over the loop”—value creation will no longer follow familiar practices but will instead be shaped around flows, signals, and outcomes¹.
It will not be enough for organizations to simply improve through AI adoption. The next major step will be transforming the mental model of how value is created. Organizations that move beyond static units and their traditional interactions will generate value through fluid teams where humans and AI agents collaborate. These organizations will no longer be structures redesigned at periodic intervals but ecosystems that continuously fine-tune themselves.
Human responsibilities will also undergo fundamental change with increasing AI dominance. The skills and capabilities required to be an effective team member will evolve, and the ability to communicate, interact, and collaborate with AI agents will become key parameters shaping outcomes. Roles focused on defining goals, setting context, prioritizing, ensuring ethical alignment, and managing risk and exceptions will become more common. While AI agents take responsibility for production and operations, humans will determine direction and meaning.
The nature of product management—and the role of the product manager—will inevitably transform in this near future. In agentic organizations that define the future of work—regardless of the product’s nature—product managers who can make fast and consistent decisions grounded in empathy, correctly position system-generated data and insights, and prioritize strategy over operations or productivity will be the ones navigating the system.
We can already see early signals of how dramatic this transformation will be by observing how product managers’ responsibilities are evolving through AI capabilities:
- Understanding markets and gathering needs
- Creating MVPs and building prototypes
- Collecting feedback from synthetic users and conducting validation
- Gathering, cleaning, and interpreting data; turning insights into action
- Designing and running A/B tests and implementing improvements based on results
- Stakeholder management, communication, and documentation
- Estimating value and cost, and prioritization
- ...
As production accelerates in agentic organizations, deciding which problems to solve, which needs to address and how, and what to build (and what not to build) will become the primary bottleneck in value creation². Performing many of the tasks listed above—and many others—faster, cheaper, and with higher quality through AI, and even handing them over to AI, will become the bare minimum required to alleviate this bottleneck.
Sam Altman believes that the emergence of a one-person unicorn is only a matter of time³. The first person to achieve this historic milestone—something that will not be possible without AI capabilities and scalable agentic systems—will not only possess a wide range of superior qualities but will also demonstrate exceptional product management capability.
¹ The agentic organization: Contours of the next paradigm for the AI era | McKinsey
² No Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups | Andrew Ng
³ Interview with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian at Investors Conference
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