The more news we read about the evolution of corporate AI offerings and implementations, the more I struggle with one thing: The industry is rapidly turning AI agents into some sort of simulated employees. 

There seems to be a rush to build the org chart in silicon: Microsoft gives agents identities, sponsors, access rights, and employment-like lifecycle management, and it explicitly governs them in a similar way as human identities. Salesforce even describes agents as “digital workers,” and promotes the idea of a digital workforce that tries to mimic human capabilities. ServiceNow has introduced individual AI passports specifying what each agent may do at runtime. 

Apparently, what we are trying to do is reproduce the human organization in software, instead of asking ourselves what a truly machine-native organization should look like. Now companies and managers brag about the number of agents they supervise, as if this were some sort of badge of honor. As usual, and as I say in all my innovation courses, learning is way more difficult than unlearning.

Why are we sticking to that metaphor? Human organizations have roles and hierarchies partly because we, humans, have characteristics such as limited attention, memory, and communication capabilities. However, I don’t think I need to explain to you that software does not have these restrictions, and therefore, does not necessarily need to inherit those constraints. 

You can do so if you want or if you don’t know how to do better: After all, identity and permissions are necessary. But bear in mind that such anthropomorphism is, at some point, going to become technical debt.

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