Human + Agent: How Agentic Workflows Change the Role of Knowledge Workers

The arrival of powerful AI agents has reignited an old fear: will machines take white-collar jobs? In reality, the more interesting - and more immediate - question is how the role of knowledge workers will change as they collaborate with agents inside agentic workflows.

Far from making people redundant, well-designed agentic systems can make human work more meaningful, creative and impactful. But that outcome is not automatic; it depends on how we design the division of labour.

From doing the work to supervising the system

In traditional workflows, people do everything: gather inputs, interpret them, perform actions in multiple systems, check results and communicate with stakeholders. Agentic workflows redistribute these responsibilities.

Agents excel at:

• Repetitive, rules-based tasks.
• Searching and synthesising large volumes of information.
• Tracking state across many items and following up reliably.
• Operating APIs and tools at machine speed.

Humans remain essential for:

• Setting goals and constraints.
• Exercising judgement in ambiguous situations.
• Handling sensitive conversations and relationships.
• Designing, supervising and improving the overall system.

In practical terms, many knowledge workers will spend less time “doing the work” and more time overseeing, coaching and refining the agents that support them.

New skills for a human-agent workplace

As agentic workflows spread, certain skills become disproportionately valuable:

• Problem framing - the ability to define outcomes, constraints and success criteria clearly so that agents can operate effectively.
• Prompt and pattern design - not just writing prompts, but understanding patterns such as triage, coordination and review.
• System thinking - seeing how workflows, data and responsibilities connect across organisational boundaries.
• Critical evaluation - spotting when an agent’s output is off, and knowing how to correct it.

These are not entirely new skills, but they become central rather than optional. Training and job design should reflect that shift.

The emotional side of working with agents

It is also important to acknowledge the emotional dimension. People may experience a mix of excitement, curiosity, anxiety and scepticism when agents appear in their workflows.

Leaders can help by:

• Being transparent about where agents are being introduced and why.
• Involving frontline staff in the design and testing of agentic workflows.
• Emphasising that humans remain accountable for outcomes, with agents as tools rather than autonomous actors.
• Recognising and celebrating examples where human-agent collaboration delivers better results than either could alone.

Ignoring these feelings and focusing purely on technology is a recipe for resistance and superficial adoption.

Rethinking roles and career paths

As agents take over routine work, some roles may shrink, but new ones will emerge. For example:

• A customer support agent might evolve into a customer experience designer, responsible for shaping the agentic flows that serve customers day-to-day.
• A finance analyst might become a scenario designer, asking better questions of agent-powered models and interpreting the answers in context.
• An operations coordinator might grow into an agent orchestrator, managing a portfolio of workflows and continually tuning them.

Organisations that proactively redesign roles and career paths will find it easier to retain talent and capture the full benefits of agentic workflows.

Guardrails to protect human judgement

To get the best of both worlds, you will need guardrails that preserve human judgement where it matters most. Examples include:

• Clear thresholds for when agents must seek human approval.
• Policies about what agents may never decide (for example, certain HR or legal matters).
• Training on common failure modes such as hallucinations, bias and over-confidence.
• Dashboards that make the state and performance of agentic workflows visible to their human owners.

The aim is not to create bureaucracy, but to ensure that humans remain comfortably in charge - informed by agents, not overshadowed by them.

A more human future of work

It is tempting to view agentic workflows through the narrow lens of efficiency. Yet they also offer a chance to reshape knowledge work around what humans do best: creativity, empathy, storytelling, negotiation and holistic decision-making.

If we seize that opportunity, the partnership between humans and agents can lead to workplaces where people spend more time on meaningful problems and less time on digital drudgery. That is a future worth designing for.