On the first night of HR Tech 2026, I joined an analyst dinner. Picture a long table, great food, and some of the smartest people in HR tech. Between courses, our hosts put a statement to the room and asked what we thought: managers will soon manage people and AI agents in the same system, with the same tools.
We took turns with the mic, and the answers ranged from an emphatic “yes” to “no, but…” At one point, the conversation turned to compliance and whether agents are entitled to the same social niceties as our colleagues. Not to offend anyone, but that got a hard eye roll from me. Agents aren’t people. Managing a person and managing a workflow or a tool are not the same, and pretending they are doesn’t do anyone any favors.
We didn’t put the machines on the org chart during the Second Industrial Revolution
I kept thinking about the Second Industrial Revolution. Between the 1870s and World War I, electricity, steel, and the moving assembly line turned factories into engines of mass production. Machines took over work that people had done by hand, and in many cases they replaced those workers outright. Owners invested heavily in the new equipment and cared a great deal about keeping it running. Yet machines doing a person’s job never made it into the reporting structure. Machines clearly belonged to operations, and the org chart belonged to people.
Agents are far more capable than the machines of that era. They can plan, make decisions within set limits, and complete tasks with little human input. That capability may make the org chart idea appealing to CEOs and their investors, but it still doesn’t make an agent a person. Managers should absolutely know which agents their teams use and whether those agents do the job. That’s oversight of technology, though, not management of a person.
And if we really want agents on the org chart, let’s be consistent. Put people on the tech stack and have IT manage them. (I’m kidding. Mostly.) The idea sounds absurd in that direction, and I’d argue it’s just as absurd in the other.
Put a manufacturing tool in charge?
Agents are, in effect, the manufacturing tools of knowledge work. Manage them in the same system as people, and the logic of a manufacturing tool ends up in charge of how we treat the humans in it.
Think about what good managers actually do. They coach, they notice when someone is having a rough week, and they help people grow. They sort out conflict and earn trust slowly. An agent needs none of that. It needs setup, monitoring, and a fix when something breaks.
My worry is what happens when both live in one system. The tools will lean toward whatever is easiest to measure, like throughput, tasks completed, and utilization. Those numbers work fine for software. Applied to people, they flatten out everything that makes work human. So the question I thought about at dinner was this: why would we choose to further reduce people’s humanity when employees are already feeling the AI strain?
What the data says
Blurring the line between people and agents doesn’t only hurt people — it comes at a cost. Research published in Harvard Business Review surveyed more than 1,200 managers and found that when AI was framed as an employee instead of a tool, managers caught 18% fewer errors. Their personal accountability for those errors also fell by 9 percentage points. When you anthropomorphize an agent, people check its work less carefully and take less ownership when it gets things wrong.
Who is your org chart for?
I understand the appeal. An org chart full of agents tells investors a nice story about lean teams and output per head. But an org chart doesn’t exist for investors, it exists for the people inside the organization. It tells them who they report to, who they can turn to, and where they belong.
So before anyone redraws theirs, I’d ask: are you designing your org chart for your investors, or for your organization?
Agents need governance, and every one of them should have a human who is accountable for it. That just doesn’t belong on the org chart.
Roberta Gogos is an HR Industry Go-to-market Leader and Analyst. She has been behind the scenes at market-leading companies to help them shift market narrative, influence buyer behavior and expand into new markets. She is known for her ability to turn strategic vision into measurable execution through positioning, storytelling, and operational rigor.
Since 2024, Roberta has been focused on industry research used by investors, corporate leaders, and vendors to assess technologies and inform M&A decisions, improve GTM, enable sales, inform product development, and develop thought leadership.
She has 20 years of experience in marketing, positioning, and strategy, with 10+ years of that being directly related to talent and the workforce.
