Introduction

Executives have long relied on simple categories to frame how technology fits into organizations: Tools automate tasks, people make decisions, and strategy determines how the two work together. That framing is no longer sufficient. A new class of systems — agentic AI — complicates these boundaries. These systems can plan, act, and learn on their own. They are not just tools to be operated or assistants waiting for instructions. Increasingly, they behave like autonomous teammates, capable of executing multistep processes and adapting as they go. Notably, 76% of respondents to our global executive survey say they view agentic AI as more like a coworker than a tool.

For strategists, agentic AI’s dual nature as both a tool and coworker creates new dilemmas. A single agent might take over a routine step, support a human expert with analysis, and collaborate across workflows in ways that shift decision-making authority. This tool-coworker duality breaks down traditional management logic, which assumes that technology either substitutes or complements, automates or augments, is labor or capital, or is a tool or a worker, but not all at once. Organizations now face an unprecedented challenge: managing a single system that demands both human resource approaches and asset management techniques.

The separation of technology and strategy inside most organizations exacerbates this challenge. Technology executives focus on technology issues, making pilot, vendor, or infrastructure decisions. Strategic executives focus on markets, competition, and people. But agentic AI makes that separation untenable. It simultaneously influences the design of processes, the structure of roles, the allocation of decision rights, and the culture of accountability.