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New roles are coming to the workforce thanks to agentic AI, argues Yemi Olagbaiye . (Photo: LeonidKos / Shutterstock)
Accenture is the latest multinational to reinvent its workflows around agentic AI, leading ever more people to fear an “AI job apocalypse.” But this booming new chapter in AI’s playbook is more about role reinvention than job loss.
Agentic AI is reshaping work. These aren’t just smart tools that automate tasks — they’re autonomous agents that can reason, act, and collaborate with both humans and each other. As multi-agent systems take hold, rigid hierarchies are giving way to more fluid, decentralised models of coordination.
Most organisations aren’t ready. Not because they lack technology, but because they lack the frameworks — governance, cultural readiness, and design thinking — to integrate agents without losing clarity or control.
To operate at this level, many companies will start building their own agents: software-based team members with defined roles and limits. That means rethinking organisational structure — and creating new human roles to support, guide and collaborate with these systems.
This is the real reinvention. Not replacing people, but redesigning how we work together. Here are the competitive vacancies we may all be applying for as the agentic era takes hold.
Cognitive UX Designer
As AI agents become more autonomous — reasoning through tasks, adapting to context, and learning on the job — their ‘thinking; needs to be deliberately designed.
The Cognitive UX Designer is responsible for shaping that thought process. This role defines how agents prioritise, escalate, and make decisions — and how they learn to do it better over time. It’s not about surface-level interface design. It’s about structuring the underlying mental model: the rules, boundaries and behaviours that guide agentic action.
That includes setting the parameters for trust, outlining when agents defer to humans, and designing how they interact within broader teams of people and machines. It’s part designer, part systems thinker, part safety lead — with a deep focus on alignment, accountability and control. In short: this is the person who decides how your AI agents behave — and how far they’re allowed to go.
Agent Architect
The single-agent model is a myth. In the new reality of agentic AI, future organisations will run on swarms of AI agents — each with different roles, data privileges and risk profiles. Without a cohesive structure, this can quickly descend into chaos.
The Agent Architect is a hybrid strategist systems thinker who choreographs how agents interact across workflows, departments and contexts. Think enterprise architecture for AI. Their job is to design the “plumbing” behind agent collaboration: the workflows, prompt protocols and inter-agent dependencies that allow agents to function as a coherent team. Crucially, they also ensure humans stay in the loop — inserting brakes, boundaries and override points to prevent runaway autonomy. They will also help to dodge the legacy siloes that so many companies still contend with.
Agent Onboarding Lead
Let’s say you’ve designed a multi-agent team of AI products. Now you need to integrate them into your company by aligning them with your processes, values and policies. Of course, businesses onboard people all the time – but not usually 50 different roles at once. Clearly, the sheer scale of agentic AI presents its own challenges.
Businesses will need to rely on a really tight onboarding process. The role of the agent onboarding lead creates the AI equivalent of an employee handbook: spelling out what agents are responsible for, how they escalate decisions, and where they must defer to humans. They’ll define trust thresholds, safe deployment criteria, and sandbox environments for gradual rollout. In short, they’re the final gatekeeper between experimentation and full deployment.
AI Culture & Collaboration Officer
Organisational change rarely fails on capability – it fails on culture. The AI Culture & Collaboration Officer protects the human heartbeat of the company through a time of radical transition.
As agents take on more responsibilities, human employees risk losing a sense of purpose, visibility, or control. The culture officer will continually check how everyone feels about the transition. This role ensures collaboration rituals evolve, morale stays intact, and trust is continually monitored — not just in the agents, but in the organisation’s direction of travel. It’s a future-facing HR function with teeth.
Governance Pathway Steward
General wisdom has it that, with Agentic AI able to automate entry-level tasks at scale, entry-level roles will disappear first. What this means is businesses risk erasing the foundational learning experiences that develop judgment and oversight. Without deliberate safeguards, the pipeline of future leaders dries up. This role ensures people at all levels still have space to learn, develop and step into leadership — even as AI takes over foundational tasks.
The Governance Pathway Steward ensures AI adoption doesn’t decimate apprenticeship layers or junior career paths. Instead, this person creates routes for humans to stay involved in critical thinking and decision-making — preserving not just compliance, but long-term organisational intelligence.
Final thoughts
Agentic AI calls for more than new tools — it calls for a new kind of organisation. One that’s structurally, culturally and humanly ready to work with autonomous systems at scale.
This shift is as much about mindset as machinery. With the right roles, frameworks and coordination models in place, agentic AI doesn’t replace people — it redefines how we work together.
Yemi Olagbaiye is the director of AI strategy & innovation at the digital software consultancy Softwire
