• "Digital workforce" means using AI agents to ditch low-value tasks, not replace humans.

• Expect small, specialized agents that boost productivity by freeing up your team’s time.

• Success depends on smart governance, cultural support, and keeping implementation lean.

Like AI “Agents”, we’re going to be hearing a great deal about the “digital workforce” from vendors this year.

The idea is that instead of hiring more people, we’ll be deploying AI Agents to supplement our workforce.

The result is no different from any other IT project

As always, this is about automating any low-value administrivia or rekey activity we’re currently doing manually. It’s just “digital workforce” and “agents” are a specialised version of that automation.

The difference is that, thanks to AI, creating each agent in our digital workforce is a much quicker and cost-effective affair. The barrier to solution has dropped so low it’s hard to notice any more. Most of us will talk about setting up these agents for far longer than it will take to implement. I’ve already seen evidence of this, many times.

To the executive team, this is a very compelling proposition if we can make it work because even the least effective and most expensive agents (the ones our CRM and other app vendors will be pushing) will be a tiny fraction of the cost of a new hire.

There are already some themes and best practices emerging

Our digital workforce will be integrated into our existing systems and given some degree of autonomy for each task, rather than our primary focus today being on personal AI assistants and copilots that are directed by us in a fine-grained manner.

There’s a productivity correlation here... the more loosely directed our digital team is, the more time they free up for us.

Staff are the ultimate winners

I’m not expecting the digital workforce to replace any one full human role any time soon.

It’s not a 1:1 replacement. It’s more likely that one person’s easy-to-automate tasks (which are typically the more mundane ones anyway) will be picked up by multiple specialist agents (hence “workforce”).

Still, freeing up say 20% of someone’s time is a huge win, particularly if it can be done for most people in the organisation.

Based on my experiences to date I believe that our staff will be the biggest winners of the digital workforce revolution. Staff will finally get to drop the mind-numbing, mundane tasks that IT still struggles to iron out and focus instead on satisfying work.

The challenge for management

The challenge for management will be in supporting staff through this transition with flexibility, training and coaching. Just like any other cultural or IT change.

Setting up each agent in a digital workforce is still going to be a human-heavy activity, so we’ll still need IT prioritisation and governance – albeit these activities will be much lighter weight for agentic initiatives. We’ll have to adapt to a much higher volume of initiatives, with the cost of each being lower than their non-AI equivalents today. This will put pressure on the efficiency of IT governance because we don’t want the cost of governance to be 10 times the implementation cost.

When you're ready, here's how I can help:

Andrew Walker
Consulting to for-purpose CEOs to deliver more impact with existing teams and systems - by freeing humans up from admin.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-walker-the-impatient-futurist/

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