You’ll Be Managing Digital Employees in 2026, a New Forecast Says

In March this year Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff, an AI hawk, landed himself in the spotlight when he predicted that this is the last time company leaders will manage only humans during a call with investors, he predicted that this is the last time company leaders will manage only humans. Given that his company had just launched a system that sold AI agents to Salesforce customers it was easy to brush off the prediction as an enthusiastic sales pitch. Now global market research outfit Forrester has predicted more or less the same thing, and says that next year is when things will begin to change. And the changes aren’t going to be small. In a new report first published on the Forbes website, Forrester researchers explain that AI agents are poised to “move beyond” helping workers boost their efficiency—the main selling point for AI at the moment—and instead will join the workforce. This means leadership will have to think about “orchestrating workflows independent of human workers.” They’ll have to think about “technology as part of the workforce” and that means changing planning as well as day-to-day business. HR teams in particular will play a big role, Forrester thinks. This is because sophisticated AI agents will be able to independently execute “complex tasks or end-to-end processes, acting as a virtual member of a team.” Strip away the cloak of anodyne corporate speak and this means Forrester’s predicting that AiIagents will be able to act almost at the level of a human. That means one way to manage them is to treat them as if they are almost people, with HR teams working to align agents alongside human workers on projects and tasks, tracking and optimizing a new type of “hybrid workforce.” One way to do this is to deploy human capital management (HCM) techniques, Forrester suggests. HCM is a system of rules and software that approaches employees as valuable assets, and the report notes that while mainly large enterprises use HCM now, due to sheer numbers of staff, smaller businesses may find the trick useful for a hybrid AI/human workforce. “Facing immediate pressures of productivity and resource optimization,” driven by the fact that you can employ numerous AI agents at once, and they can work 24-7, smaller outfits may actually “benefit from this technology sooner,” the report suggests. This job may sound daunting, particularly if you’ve never experimented with this tech or you’re feeling far from thinking of AI tools as equivalent to your human workers. But Forrester thinks that around three in 10 companies that already sell enterprise software will get in on the game, offering their own HCM solutions to help you manage AI tools. Meanwhile the research company also thinks that business software companies like Oracle, Microsoft and their ilk will offer “autonomous governance” software, which will help companies deploy AI on business tasks while also ensuring there are audit trails and real-time monitoring so you stay within any compliance limits you need to follow. And if you’re concerned this sounds all too automated for you, don’t worry — Forrester says that even though these trends are shifting fast, we’re “till a few years away from a system that can independently manage an entire business unit without human involvement and adaptability.” Your leadership and management skills are still needed! Though you may be tempted to dismiss this research as not relevant to your smaller company, with its family-like feel and reliance on person-to-person collaboration, that might be a mistake. The AI revolution really is rolling on, and if even some of Forrester’s predictions prove true, then inside a year you may be in a position where you can “hire” an AI agent system that can work alongside your staff and help them achieve goals as if it were another employee. That shift will take a lot of leadership, discussing issues with your (probably quite wary) human workers, deciding how to integrate the tech into your workflows and planning and so on. It goes far beyond downloading some software and pressing a button. BY KIT EATON @KITEATON