- Agentic AI empowers people to tackle work that hasn’t been possible until now.
- As AI handles more specialized tasks, employees will need to become more generalists, able to quickly learn and pick up new skills and think differently. AI literacy will be essential to their success.
- HR teams have a critical role in guiding AI adoption, from outlining how work gets done to spearheading cultural change.
Recently, an elite programmer narrowly eked out a victory against ChatGPT’s AI model in a world coding championship in which AI models competed directly against human programmers.
“Humanity has prevailed (for now!),” winner Przemysław Dębiak, a former OpenAI employee, posted on X.
While this comment was in jest, it begs an important question: What does the future of work look like, especially if AI can outdo people in certain tasks?
To explore this paradigm and how HR leaders can prepare for AI-powered workforces, Eightfold Chief People Officer Meghna Punhani sat down with three CEOs of agentic AI startups: Amit Aggarwal, Co-founder and CEO of Data Iris; Munish Gandhi, Co-founder and COO of Statisfy; and Srinath Sridhar, Co-founder and CEO of Regie.ai.
Here, we share key moments from their fireside chat, including predictions about job displacement, how skills and HR are changing, and the top takeaways every HR leader needs to know to prepare for the era ahead.
Amit Aggarwal talks about the opportunities AI creates in an age where it will also change ways of work.
Fear or fact: AI job displacement
“We are all living through the fastest rewrite of work in modern history,” Punhani said. Every industry and function is being reimagined and restructured with AI.
However, this rapid change has rekindled fears around job displacement. In 2023, Goldman Sachs predicted the elimination and displacement of around 300 million jobs, and that was only considering the impact of generative AI.
With the rise of agentic AI, fully autonomous digital workers, these fears are being reignited. And this time, it’s not just hype.
“Every automation so far has automated repetitive tasks,” Sridhar said, whose business, Regie.ai, offers an agentic AI platform to sales reps. “For the first time, we’re getting hit on the white-collar stuff, the creative and non-creative sides as well. There’s nowhere to hide [from AI].”
Sridhar believes agentic AI will displace millions of jobs outright. Aggarwal, however, whose company Iris provides agentic business analysts, argued that there’s a lot of potential to be gained from agentic AI, largely in freeing up time, our most precious and finite resource.
“The bigger opportunity with AI is doing the things that we were not doing today that need to be done,” he said. “But we can’t because we just don’t have the resources that can now be done by AI.”
For example, with AI-powered business analysts workers can have 24/7 agents dedicated to helping them make sense of their data — data that was just sitting in enterprise systems unused and unanalyzed.
With agentic AI, these workers can glean new insights and make confident decisions in ways that simply wouldn’t have been possible before.
Gandhi, whose organization Statisfy provides customer success agents, envisioned a multiyear approach to job displacement. Initially, many tasks will be automated, which will create more bandwidth and job transformation.
“In the five-year time horizon, the skills, talent, and functions will change,” he said. “Overall, I think if AI is successful, revenue per employee should go up.”
Srinath Sridhar shares how he thinks about agentic AI through the lens of personas and workflows.
Navigating the AI-powered organization
Punhani asked the panel how HR leaders can think about building workforces in light of agentic AI: If models and agents can outperform people at highly technical tasks, what’s left for workers? And just how much work will people and machines do respectively?
Aggarwal believes we’ll move away from specialization to generalization.
“I’ve hired engineering teams and product teams for a long time,” he said. “Go back 10 years, and we had seven or eight different roles we would hire for: QA engineer, back-end engineer, front-end engineer, and full-stack DevOps. AI brings that specialization, so you can hire a person who does a little bit of coding, design, back end, and front end — because the AI tools are getting so good.”
For HR’s part, Aggarwal believes they will need to sort out accountability around machines and AI training. The biggest hurdle, he said, will be the cultural change, encouraging everyone to embrace AI while attending to the nitty-gritty details, such as ensuring AI agents speak the same language as employees and follow the organization’s cultural norms and values.
Gandhi was more focused on the areas that can be easily automated writing letters to help employees qualify for mortgages.
“All of that is ripe for AI disruption. It’s a no-brainer that everybody here should be thinking about how to automate [those kinds of repetitive tasks],” he said.
Sridhar noted how the world is still largely thinking of agentic AI through the lens of personas: a business analyst agent or a customer success agent. But he said there’s another way to look at agents: through the lens of workflows.
In other words, having agents dedicated to specific, end-to-end tasks rather than entire roles. One viewpoint isn’t necessarily better than the other, he said, but it is a helpful distinction.
Final takeaways
Punhani capped the session by asking the panelists about their top takeaways for HR leaders.
Sridhar encouraged HR leaders to take any workflow, no matter how small, and automate it as much as possible. Then you’re ensuring you’re gaining value from AI.
Gandhi stressed that people using AI are going to perform better than those who aren’t, so he encouraged AI use across the business and every HR process.
He also ended with a warning: If you don’t start to make the shift toward AI now, it will come back to haunt you in the next two years as you inevitably fall behind.
The final panelist, Aggarwal, encouraged HR leaders to embrace change. It can be overwhelming and feel scary at times, but AI is here to stay so — as HR has always done — we must adapt.
Watch the full session, Unleashing agentic organizations: A fireside chat on empowering your workforce, from Cultivate ’25, available now on demand.