By Hafsa Rizvi

Your next coworker might not need tea breaks or festival holidays. Agentic AI, think of it as AI that actually works instead of just answering questions, is already being tested in offices around the world.

What's Actually Happening

Current AI is like asking your junior for help. You give instructions, they deliver results, you check and use them. Agentic AI is different; it's like having a colleague who can plan, decide, and complete entire projects without you watching over their shoulder.

Instead of just writing emails when you ask, it notices you're busy, reschedules meetings, replies to routine messages, and follows up on pending work. Without being told.

Where It's Being Used Right Now

The customer service uses AI to handle complaints, processes returns, and escalates complex issues, 24/7 without supervision. There are workers who use this for project management purposes, where AI tracks deadlines, spots problems early, and reassigns work when team members get overloaded.

And the main is marketing, where we can utilise AI to research trends, create campaigns, design graphics, and schedule posts across platforms. And the biggest relief is where we need help to manage finance, so here the AI monitors spending, flags unusual transactions, and can even approve routine payments.

This isn't experimental; companies are doing this now.

What This Means for Your Job

You got good news where routine, boring tasks disappear. You'll focus on strategy, creativity, and relationship building instead of data entry and status updates. Then you are able to do the reality check, where some roles will change completely. Administrative work becomes AI supervision. Analysts become interpreters of AI insights rather than data collectors.

You get new opportunities. Someone needs to train these AI systems, set their goals, and handle edge cases. New jobs are emerging around AI management.

The Problems Nobody Talks About

When it comes to trust issues, AI makes mistakes in simple tasks, and you catch them. When it makes decisions autonomously, errors can cascade before you notice. Control problems come when the more independent AI becomes, the harder it is to understand why it made specific choices.

Security risks happen when these systems need access to everything to work effectively. That's a lot of sensitive data in one place. Integration headaches where most companies use multiple systems that weren't built to work with autonomous AI.

What's Coming

Within five years, you might start your day reviewing what your AI colleagues accomplished overnight instead of planning your to-do list. Your role shifts from task execution to goal setting and quality control. Instead of doing the work, you'll be directing it and solving problems that AI can't handle.

How to Prepare Right Now

Learn to work with AI today. Use current AI tools for multi-step projects, not just single tasks. Practice setting clear goals and reviewing AI output. Develop skills AI can't replace. Critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and creative problem-solving become more valuable when routine work is automated.

Understand your company's data. AI is only as good as the information it has access to. Clean, organised data gets better results. Stay flexible. The pace of change is accelerating. What works today might be obsolete next year.

The Bottom Line

AI is moving from tool to teammate. This creates huge productivity gains but requires new skills and approaches. Companies adopting this technology early will have major advantages. Workers who adapt quickly will be more valuable than those who resist change.

The shift is happening now, not in some distant future. Your choice is simple: learn to work with AI colleagues or watch others who do get ahead.

Start preparing today. Your future self will thank you.