Gartner says 40% of enterprise apps will embed AI agents by end of 2026. But here’s the thing nobody’s talking about: agents aren’t just better tools—they’re a new category that breaks how we organize work. The MIT/BCG 2025 research reveals four tensions every leader will face, and most aren’t ready.
A retrospective on upgrading Clawdbot from a reactive task-doer to a proactive, system-thinking partner.
A thought has been bothering me lately during meetings. Not about the agenda. Not about the discussion quality. Something feels different. My agent isn’t here. If my agent is the one who will eventually implement, analyze, draft, simulate, and execute most of the follow-up work, why are we making decisions without it in the room? And if the agent isn’t present, are we actually wasting part of the meeting? For years, meetings assumed a very specific workflow. Humans discuss. Humans decide. Humans go back and execute. The people in the room were the ones who would do the work later, so alignment made sense. The decision-makers and the executors were the same group. Today, a large portion of execution is delegated to agents. They write the code, analyze the logs, generate the docs, explore design options, and draft the first implementation. In many cases, they are faster and more thorough than we are. Which means something subtle has changed. The “doers” are no longer fully represented in the meeting. So what happens? We make decisions based on partial information. We debate feasibility without quickly validating it. We speculate about tradeoffs that an agent could prototype in minutes. We leave with action items that could have been pre-computed during the conversation. In short, we talk first and test later. But in an agentic workflow, that order is backwards. If agents compress execution to minutes or hours, then meetings should compress uncertainty, not create more of it. Instead of debating what might work, we should be asking the agent in real time. Instead of guessing complexity, we should generate a quick implementation. Instead of assigning follow-up analysis, we should produce it on the spot. The meeting becomes less about opinions and more about evidence. This doesn’t mean replacing humans. It means changing the role of humans. We should focus on framing the problem, defining constraints, and making judgment calls, while the agent handles exploration and validation live. In that world, an agent is not a tool you use after the meeting. It is a participant during the meeting. Almost like a quiet engineer sitting next to you, ready to answer “what if” instantly. So now I catch myself thinking in meetings: if my agent isn’t here, are we making decisions blind? Because increasingly, the highest leverage thing in the room isn’t another opinion. It’s faster feedback.
As AI agents accelerate code generation, reviewing every diff no longer scales. The real bottleneck shifts from writing code to understanding its consequences. Instead of relying solely on explanations or tests, a simple technique like asking the agent to generate a short quiz forces the human to prove comprehension before approving changes. Tests verify correctness, explanations summarize intent, but quizzes verify understanding. In an agentic world, effective oversight is less about inspecting code and more about validating that we truly understand what the system will do.
Sprints were originally designed to manage slow, uncertain execution in software development. As AI agents compress coding and iteration cycles from weeks to hours or days, execution is no longer the primary bottleneck for many teams. Keeping two-week sprints unchanged often shifts time into waiting, over-polishing, or coordination overhead. Rather than abandoning sprints, teams need to redefine their purpose. In an agentic environment, sprints should function as a cadence for decision-making, alignment, and risk management, while execution flows continuously. The real question is not whether sprints still matter, but what problem they are meant to solve now.