By Isabelle Bousquette
Human resources leaders at some of America's largest companies say it's time to stop treating their AI as people.
For the last year, companies have grappled with the idea of managing a joint workforce of human employees and AI agents that have their own names, job titles and key performance indicators.
But executives from IBM, Microsoft and other companies say thinking of AI agents as analogous to human workers is hindering attempts to get full value from the technology.
Agents shouldn't have human names. They shouldn't be on org charts. And they shouldn't be given a specific job title, Nickle LaMoreaux, chief human resources officer at IBM said, speaking Thursday at the WSJ Leadership Institute's Chief People Officer Summit in Menlo Park, Calif.
"We learned this the hard way," she said. IBM used to have a series of agents that went by names like Harry, Hermione, Charlie and Sherlock. But it fell into a trap of focusing too much on each agent's individual use cases rather than using them for more impactful large-scale process re-engineering.
"Too many CPOs are getting so hung up on: what does this agent do, what does this AI do?" she said. The biggest bang for your buck, she said, isn't in individual assistant-type agents that, say, help write emails. It's in integrating AI into enterprise workflows.
"This is you declaring, top down, in the organization: here's how employees are going to get customer support. Here's how we're going to run the promotion process. What's going to be automated. That workflow, that experience, is really what we should be focused on."
Leaders should tackle AI the same way they've tackled earlier waves of digital transformation and automation, LaMoreaux said. "Manage technology the way you've always managed technology for decades. Managing people is very different."
To be sure, some companies continue to push forward with the idea that AI agents should be considered fully formed "digital workers." BNY, for example, said it employs dozens of AI 'digital employees' that have company logins and human managers, many of whom go by the name Eliza, named after the wife of BNY founder Alexander Hamilton.
Microsoft's agents do have names, albeit without a Broadway musical tie-in, said Chief People Officer Amy Coleman, also speaking at the Summit. But it ends there.
She doesn't envision agents as stepping into their own fully fleshed out job titles. "I don't really think about roles and jobs that can be automated as much as I think about tasks in a job that can be automated, " she said.
Coleman also said she doesn't envision a future where an AI agent is ever managing a human. Although, she added that things could change.
"We are in that messy time of how we're going to figure it all out," she said.
The shift away from equating AI agents with human workers has less to do with quelling human anxiety over layoffs and job replacement. It's more a candid assessment of what the technology can actually do. Agents simply aren't humans.
For one, even extremely capable, long-running agents can't be held liable for their actions, said Box cofounder and CEO Aaron Levie, also speaking at the Summit. "Accountability has to lie with humans. All our laws are set up to require that."
That said, Levie added he believes the transformation agents will drive inside organizations will be several orders of magnitude larger than previous waves of automation.
"This is the biggest shift we've ever seen in corporate work," Levie said.
Write to Isabelle Bousquette at isabelle.bousquette@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
BNY said it employs dozens of AI "digital employees" built on the company's proprietary AI platform Eliza, which is named after the wife of BNY founder Alexander Hamilton. "America's HR Leaders Say We're Thinking About AI Agents All Wrong," at 11:56 a.m. ET, incorrectly said BNY digital employees are named Eliza.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 27, 2026 16:33 ET (20:33 GMT)
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