[AI SPRINT] AMA, Your Agent Workforce, and TRAILBLAZING with AI

The feedback from last week’s newsletter was clear: you want more deep dives—especially into new AI vendors, real-world use cases, and an AI Q&A. So, let’s do exactly that!

This week: we’ll dive into AI business agents, how to start creating new AI-driven products in the final step in the AI SPRINT framework, and share a couple lessons from Amazon.

But first:

Today’s Deep Dive: Agents and the AI Workforce of Tomorrow

Many people have heard that AI agents are coming, but the questions remain: What does that really mean? What will an AI workforce look like? And most importantly—how does this affect my career?

Let’s start with an excellent chart and write-up from Wing VC about the AI workforce ecosystem. It maps out AI agents across different business functions—customer service, HR, finance, sales, and more. (I think it’s missing a few, like logistics and executive management 😉, but trust me—there’s an AI for nearly everything.)

As you see, AI agents are being developed and trained for essentially all roles in an organization, including yours. They are trained on the best practices for each function (imagine a Sales Agent trained on every Sales Best Seller in the last 30 years), they can process company-specific data, like your customer list, and they continuously improve, while working 24 hours a day.

And when AI has shown it can beat doctors at diagnosing cancer? Handling a customer service ticket is far, far simpler.

So, what does it take to make an AI agent work?

1. Instruction – You need to tell it what to do—the goals, style, and methodology to use.

2. Data Access – Feed it the right information: from static CSV uploads to connecting it to your company data systems.

3. Oversight & Monitoring – Continuous monitoring to ensure it works as intended.

And once set up, these agents work 24/7, refining their performance continuously.

A Few AI Agents to Check Out:

• OpenAI’s Sales Agent – Last week, OpenAI demoed its internal sales agent, which autonomously handles incoming website requests. It triages, qualifies, and responds within moments to high-quality leads, even offering a link to book a meeting. Although the video isn’t clear, this shows the direction ChatGPT is moving and how Agents will work.

• Agent Frank – A $500/month sales development agent that works with any system. Just give it a list of prospects and get going.

• Accounting Agents – From automating month-end-close to your own, AI CFO, AI will help your internal finance processes.

• Nurses from Hippocratic AI – AI-powered nurse agents offer scalable, specialized care, starting around $10 per hour.

AI & Your Job Security: Should You Be Worried?

Are agents exciting? Yes. A little concerning? Also yes. If AI can diagnose cancer, where does that leave you? Job security questions are real, and they deserve honest answers.

A few weeks ago, NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang put it this way:

“In a lot of ways, the IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future.”

Meaning? AI isn’t just another application you subscribe to—it’s an entire digital workforce. And just like human employees, AI workers need to be hired, trained, managed, and optimized. Jensen thinks IT will take on this role, but I hope not.

Here's a story: At Amazon, when I worked in Finance Technology, we had a core mandate: cut Finance operational costs by 10% every year (on a variable cost per unit basis).

Faced with that challenge in other companies, traditional finance leaders would likely turn to IT and say, "Figure this out." The problem? That approach makes IT a bottleneck, slowing down progress and limiting innovation. After all, they are serving every other function, and they aren’t finance experts!

But at Amazon, Finance owned its own technology responsibility (as does every other support function). Instead of relying on a central IT team for every technical need, they had dedicated product managers, software engineers, and data scientists embedded within the Finance function—focused solely on delivering solutions for their own goals. This structure let us rapidly experiment, iterate, and implement AI-driven efficiencies—without being stuck in IT’s queue.

Importantly, this means that Finance leaders weren’t just users of technology someone else gave them; they were owners of innovation, responsible for ensuring AI-driven automation delivered real business impact.

I believe this is the model of the future of work: each business function will take ownership of AI adoption and management of its AI agents. 

Organizations that allow HR, Sales, and Operations to oversee their own AI agents will move faster and outperform those that remain dependent on a central IT department for innovation. With thousands of AI tools available, IT simply cannot track and implement the best solutions for every function.

That means that just as managers today are responsible for leading teams, they will soon be responsible for leading AI-driven workforces. They will be responsible for selecting and managing AI agents, ensuring they are supporting the business strategy, hitting their KPIs, and identifying new opportunities to improve work. All while ensuring proper security and governance of company data and processes.

Job titles may stay the same—HR leader, CEO, Accounts Payable—but each role will evolve to support this.

That means: the most successful professionals will be those who develop a foundational technical knowledge, learn to apply AI strategically, integrate it into their business goals, and actively manage AI-driven teams.

And you still have an important role as a human in managing your AI workforce:

• Bringing Your Expertise to the Table: Your lifetime of experience equips you with the wisdom and intuition to make nuanced decisions that AI alone cannot.

• Harnessing the Power of Human Connection: Relationships, collaboration, and trust are the foundation of success. While AI can process information, only humans can build the deep, empathetic connections that inspire teams, foster innovation, and drive long-term impact.

• Maximizing AI’s Potential with Human Insight: AI is a powerful tool, but its true value is unlocked when combined with human creativity, critical thinking, and ethical judgment. Together, AI and people can achieve outcomes that neither could accomplish alone.

Combining your own ingenuity with the powers of AI will be the defining skill set of the future. And if you start now, you’ll be ahead of the curve, creating job security and success in your career and company.

These AI agents are already being deployed in forward-thinking businesses—reshaping workflows and operations today.

So, what’s stopping you from deploying one today? 

This Week’s Resource List

• AI Agents Have Officially Entered the Workplace, Flaws and All (4 minutes) AI agents are now widely adopted in workplaces to automate tasks that once required human workers, despite their imperfections.

• Why agents are the next frontier of generative AI (10 minutes) AI agents, powered by generative AI, are expected to revolutionize productivity by automating complex workflows and acting as skilled virtual coworkers.

• AI agents might be the new workforce, but they still need a manager (8 minutes) AI agents are increasingly performing tasks autonomously in workplaces but require thoughtful management due to challenges in reliability and traceability.

STEP 6: TRAILBLAZE with New Offerings that drive Growth

By this stage of the AI SPRINT framework, your staff should already be using AI in their roles, and you should have begun automating processes with AI agents. Your company should be experiencing improvements in both work quality and productivity.

For legacy companies, realizing these efficiency increases often lead to layoffs or slowed hiring.

But that’s an outdated view.

The real advantage of AI is its ability to unlock new opportunities—products, services, and even entirely new business models that drive long-term value and were previously too costly to build.

This is another lesson from Amazon, who is famous for reinvesting their profits back into innovation. And I think it will be the standard approach of successful, AI-Enabled companies.

Just consider: with AI, building new products and services has never been easier. AI has slashed R&D costs by 50% or more, allowing businesses to test ideas faster, implement new products, and create new capabilities with fewer resources than ever before. A single developer can now build AI-powered applications that previously required entire teams.  Anyone can build a new website in moments (check out https://gamma.app): create one for every customer proposal or client—beating the competition.

So why would you not take productivity savings and reinvest them in growth?

• It helps your career.

• It brings in more customers

• It creates a more successful business.

• It keeps jobs.

And that is way better than layoffs, right?

So where do you start?

That’s a bit more complicated, as most leaders don’t have much experience driving innovation. But here are some key steps to get started:

1. Assign an Owner with a clear objective: Identify and validate three new product or service ideas within 90 days.

2. Bring your leadership team together and ask these four questions:

   • How could we disrupt our own business before someone else does?

   • What sucks for our customers today?

   • What adjacent markets or services can we expand into?

   • How can AI unlock entirely new business models or revenue streams?

3. Follow the sprint process—run monthly sprints to refine ideas, validate them with customers, and find partners who can assist with execution.

And by the way, I’ve got leadership workshops ready to make this process fast and easy.

Once you complete this step and the full AI SPRINT Framework, your company will lead in cost, efficiency, capability, and innovation, setting the bar for your industry and ensuring long-term success.

So what’s your AI SPRINT for February? What bold move will you take to lead your industry?

This Week’s AI Prompt:

Since this week is about Trailblazing, here’s my favorite innovation prompt to generate ideas, using my favorite innovation framework.

Suggest 3 business model innovations using the Doblin 10 Types of Innovation Framework for the [Industry] 

Keep refining it, and you’ll be well on the way to creating some awesome new capabilities for your business!

This Week’s Takeaway

This week we explored the rise of AI business agents, how to deploy and manage AI-driven teams, and why human expertise remains essential. Plus, we wrapped up the AI SPRINT framework with strategies to use AI for new product innovation and business growth.

Action Step: Drop me an email to schedule a leadership workshop or discussion to explore the opportunities AI can unlock for your organization. Use this as a chance to SPARK Action and get your team thinking about your next moves in the AI journey.

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