How Agentic AI Will Transform Workflows in HR and Beyond

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Hello everyone. Welcome to another Five Minute Leader. Today, I want to talk about a topic that's on everyone's mind, and that is agentic AI.

I actually did a post, so if you are a premium subscriber, you saw that full article. I gave a breakdown of some of the HR functions in there and how agentic AI can play a role. But before I get into what I want to go over today, let me just give you kind of a high-level overview around what agentic AI is and why it's causing such a big stir in the business world.

So think about how you use AI now. You might have a tool like ChatGPT or Siri or Alexa or whatever one of those AI solutions are, and you ask it questions. It can do some research for you. Maybe it can make an image for you. It can help you code a website. It can help you read content, give you summaries, create content for you—things of that nature.

But really, what it is right now, it's kind of like a—I don't even call it a coworker yet. It's basically like a smart assistant.

In other words, it doesn't actually take action. It gives you information and insights that you have to prompt it to do. But you can't tell any of these AI tools, for example, “Hey, find me the best or the lowest flight to go to, I don't know, Shanghai. Book the flight for me.”

You can't tell it, for example, if you're an HR leader, “Hey, I have an HR function here at the company. We have low engagement scores. Run a survey, collect the insights, and then come back to me with what those insights are and some next steps.”

It's not going to do that for you. It can’t take action. If you have the survey completed, you can feed it into an AI tool and say, “Give me the insights.” But you can't have it actually complete the cycle. It can't do the whole loop for you.

So the whole idea of agentic AI is—what happens when you actually have AI tools that are like coworkers, where you can actually tell it to do something, and it's autonomous and it's going to complete a task for you?