The Next Wave of AI Is Not About Content. It Is About Action.
2-minute read
Most leaders assume they have a handle on AI. They have seen the demos, used the tools, sat through the briefings. When they think about AI strategy, they are thinking about generative AI: tools that create text, images, summaries, and code. Give a prompt, get a draft. That version of AI is real, valuable, and already reshaping how knowledge work gets done.
But the assumption that generative AI is all that AI is, and that the main leadership challenge is deploying it well, is already out of date. There is a next wave arriving that is meaningfully different. It is called agentic AI, and it does not just answer questions. It acts.
What Agentic AI Actually Does
An AI agent does not wait for a prompt. It receives a goal, breaks it into steps, executes those steps across systems and tools, and reports back with outcomes. Where generative AI says, “here is a draft of your report,” an AI agent says, “I have gathered the data, run the analysis, flagged the anomalies, and scheduled the follow-up meeting.”
Gartner projects that enterprise applications featuring AI agents will grow from less than 5% today to 40% by the end of 2026. Every major AI platform, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, now has an agent mode. This is not a future development. It is here, and it is moving faster than most leadership teams realize.⁵
We are moving from answers to outcomes. The leadership challenge shifts from overseeing what AI produces to overseeing what AI does.
Why This Changes the Leadership Equation
Earlier waves of AI required oversight of outputs, where you reviewed what AI generated and decided whether to use it. Agentic AI requires oversight of actions. These systems can trigger workflows, send communications, make database changes, and execute decisions with minimal human intervention.
That is a fundamentally different kind of accountability. Leaders need to decide which decisions can be delegated to agents, which require human judgment, and how the organization will know when an agent has done something that needs to be reversed. These are governance questions, and they need answers before the technology scales, not after.
What to Do Before You Are Behind
Start with narrow, specific use cases where the inputs and desired outcomes are clear and the consequences of errors are contained, such as scheduling, data summarization, and routine customer communications. Learn what agents can and cannot do in your environment before expanding their authority.
The organizations that will lead in the agentic era are not the ones that move fastest. They are the ones that move thoughtfully, building governance alongside capability, so that when agents take on more consequential work, the infrastructure to oversee them is already in place.
About the Author
Dr. Melissa Fristrom
Founder, Core Allies, LLC
Melissa Fristrom is the founder of Core Allies, LLC an executive coaching and advisory firm that works with C-suite leaders navigating inflection points. She advises senior leaders on strategy, organizational change, and the human side of technology adoption. Before founding Core Allies, she held senior leadership roles in frontline positions up to CEO. She is based in Boston.
The artwork in this post is from fristrom.art. Melissa works in encaustic, pigmented wax layered to explore how color carries emotion, perception, and meaning. It is a practice that runs parallel to the questions this series is asking about leadership: looking more carefully at what is actually in front of you, rather than what you expect to see.
If any of this landed, useful or uncomfortable, that's worth paying attention to. I work with leaders and their teams on exactly these questions. I'd love to connect.
mfristrom@coreallies.com · (617) 444-9809 · coreallies.com