The Humane Agentic Enterprise: How To Thrive with AI at Work

Agentic AI is helping us do things we couldn’t do before. But could it also be weakening the skills we already have? To explore this tension, Salesforce researchers are studying how knowledge workers are using AI to expand their capabilities while preserving the human expertise and judgment that make their work valuable. The findings reveal an interesting paradox. A senior designer-engineer we interviewed, who had relied heavily on AI for months, described freezing when his partner asked him to help write something. He felt he’d forgotten how. Meanwhile, an engineering architect described the opposite experience: “Some of the things I wanted to do and couldn’t before,” he said, “I can do now.” The question isn’t simply whether AI makes us more productive. It’s how we design our interactions with AI to make us better at what we do. That tension is the biggest question for anyone working with AI right now: how do you get the lift without losing the…