Michael Domingo

Let me tell you a story. It was 2:00 PM on a Friday, a day like any other, except our IT department had just unleashed their brand-new, impossibly cheerful "AI" chatbot upon an unsuspecting workforce. We were promised efficiency. We were promised simplicity. We were promised the future.

​What we got was chaos.

​A departing employee was waiting on a critical offboarding document they needed to sign that very day. As the clock ticked towards the end of their employment, the document was nowhere to be found. A few minutes later, a digital smoke signal of pure frustration lands in my Slack: "Hey, where's my document?!"

​Confused, I started digging. It turns out, our brilliant new chatbot, when asked where to get this specific form, didn't direct the employee to our HR Operations team—the actual people who handle this. Instead, it confidently and courteously sent them on a digital wild goose chase that ended directly, and wrongfully, with me.

​After a few choice words with our IT folks, I was left with one crystal clear thought: This is why basic chatbots are awful.

​And I know my story isn't unique. We are all being collectively gaslit by the current state of "AI," which is, to put it mildly, catastrophically dumb. I'm talking about that little pop-up window of despair that appears on every website, promising a friendly helper and delivering the interactive equivalent of a beige wall.

​You know the routine. You ask your HR chatbot a simple question like, "How many vacation days do I have left?" and it replies with the warmth and intellectual rigor of a Magic 8-Ball filled with corporate jargon: "That's an excellent question! Our comprehensive benefits guide can be found on our intranet!"

​This is the technological equivalent of asking someone for the time and having them hand you a sundial and a book on astrophysics. It's a glorified search bar that has somehow learned the art of condescending empathy.

​But—and this is the crucial part—while we've been held hostage by these digital sock puppets, the actual revolution has been happening in the background. It's called Agentic AI, and it's about to make everything we currently think of as "AI" look like a toddler's toy.

​The future isn't a better chatbot. The future is no chatbot at all.

​Your New Intern is a Soulless, Caffeinated Overachiever

​So, what exactly is Agentic AI?

​Let's use an analogy. A chatbot is a librarian who, when you ask for a book on ancient Rome, just points vaguely towards the history section and whispers, "Good luck."

​An AI Agent, on the other hand, is a librarian who sprints into the stacks, reads every single book on ancient Rome, cross-references them with architectural digests, writes a full dissertation on the socio-economic impact of the aqueduct system, formats it perfectly, emails it to your boss, and then reorganizes your entire bookshelf by the Dewey Decimal System while you were out getting a coffee.

​It doesn't just find information; it takes action.

​Think of it less as a search bar and more as a swarm of hyper-caffeinated squirrels 🐿️ in tiny business suits, ready to execute multi-step tasks without question, without fatigue, and, crucially, without judgment. It fundamentally changes our relationship with technology. You're not a "user" anymore. You're a "delegator."

​The Old Way: "Here is a 17-item checklist to onboard our new hire in Workday. Please complete steps 1-5, then notify IT to complete steps 6-9, then..."

​The New Way: "Onboard this person. Get it done."

​And the agent, this ghost in the machine, just... does it. It orchestrates Workday, your IT ticketing system, and Outlook like it's conducting a symphony of pure, unadulterated administrative action.

​So, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

​This is, of course, where the terror sets in. Because while eliminating the soul-crushing drudgery of corporate bureaucracy sounds like a utopian dream, we are forgetting one tiny, crucial detail.

​These agents aren't "smart." They are just incredibly powerful instruction-following machines. They have no common sense. They are the most literal-minded employee in the history of the world.

​When you delegate a task, you are handing the keys to a very powerful, very fast, and very stupid car to a driver who just learned to exist five seconds ago. The potential for chaos is... magnificent.

​Imagine telling an agent, "Give the new hire a competitive salary." It might scrape data from the internet and decide that, based on San Francisco tech rates, your new junior analyst in Omaha, Nebraska should be paid $300,000 a year with a bonus paid entirely in company-branded stress balls. Or you ask it to enroll you in the "best" dental plan, and it signs you up for a 10-year subscription to Horse & Hound magazine because it found a keyword match on "strong teeth."

​Our Job Is No Longer 'System Admin.' It's 'AI Lion Tamer.'

​This brings us to our jobs as HR Technology professionals. As I've said a few times, our roles are about to be turned completely inside out. We're not system admins anymore; we're lion tamers, and someone just replaced our chair and whip with a strongly worded "request form", aka a "prompt".

​Our new job is to become prompt architects, AI ethicists, and guardrail designers. We are the people who have to anticipate every magnificently stupid thing our brilliant new agent could do and stop it before it wires the CEO's bonus to a llama 🦙 farm in Peru. The future of our profession isn't about knowing how the machine works. It's about knowing how to keep the machine from driving us all off a cliff.

​Which leads me to one final, terrifying thought.

​The biggest risk isn't that Agentic AI is coming for our jobs. It's that we're about to give it the most important jobs in the company, and we haven't even written its onboarding plan yet.

​Good luck.