Report: Companies Need a New Playbook to Unlock the Value of AI Agents

As AI agents move beyond experimentation, companies must decide not just where to deploy them, but how work itself should change.

A new report from The Conference Board offers a five-stage framework for redesigning work around AI to produce measurable business value. The framework draws on interviews, focus groups, and hands-on research with senior HR, talent, and AI leaders.

The stakes are rising as AI investment accelerates. In The Conference Board C-Suite Outlook 2026, 43.6% of executives identified AI and technology as an investment priority, more than any other investment choice. But capturing value requires more than buying tools or launching pilots. Leaders must decide on the desired business outcomes, determine how work will be divided between people and AI, put the right governance in place, measure results, and decide how any gains will be used.

“AI agents can complete more and more work, but capability alone doesn’t create value,” said Allan Schweyer, Principal Researcher, Human Capital, The Conference Board. “Companies need to know what outcome they’re trying to improve, what the agent should—and shouldn’t—do, and whether the redesigned process actually performs better. Otherwise, more automation can simply mean doing the wrong work faster.”

The report outlines five stages:

1. Start with the desired business outcome.

• Identify the outcome the organization wants to improve first, then determine where AI agents can add value.
• Avoid deploying agents simply because the technology is available.

2. Redesign and allocate work before deploying agents.

• Break workflows down task by task to determine what AI should handle, what people should handle, and where they should work together.
• Consider quality, judgment, accountability, the consequences of errors, employee impacts, and customer value.
• People should remain accountable for the results, even when agents perform work autonomously.
• Deliberately redesign the human role, including the skills, training, job level, and potentially compensation required for the work that remains.

3. Build the infrastructure, governance, and budget agents require.

• Leaders need to account for data, permissions, controls, monitoring, maintenance, and human supervision.
• The full cost of operating an agent can extend well beyond vendor or model fees. In one illustrative model, direct AI-model use represented just 9.4% of an agent’s recurring monthly cost.

4. Measure what people and agents produce together.

• Track whether redesigned work improves quality, speed, cost, or other business outcomes, not simply whether an agent completed a task.
• Time freed by AI should not automatically be counted as a financial gain; the organization should first demonstrate how that time was used and what measurable result it produced.
• The report recommends distinguishing among three types of gains:
  • Cash savings: Spending that actually disappears, such as overtime, contractor costs, or other expenses.
  • Avoided future costs: Planned spending or hiring that is no longer required.
  • Higher-value work: Employee time redirected to other work that produces a measurable result.

5. Decide where the gains go.

• Verified gains can reduce costs, help organizations handle more work without equivalent hiring, support reinvestment, or deliver benefits to employees and customers.
• Leaders should clearly communicate how those gains will affect jobs, staffing, and employees.

Protect early-career talent pipelines.

• When AI takes over routine work, organizations risk eliminating tasks through which employees traditionally build judgment and experience.
• Leaders should replace that learning deliberately through mentoring, rotations, supervised practice, and progressively more complex work.

HR and IT need to work together.

• IT may own the technology, but HR should help shape roles, skills, staffing, training, and change management wherever AI alters how work gets done.

“Agentic AI is not simply an IT initiative, nor is it solely an HR initiative,” said Diana Scott, US Human Capital Center Leader, The Conference Board. “Business leaders need to own the outcome, technology needs to provide secure and dependable tools, finance needs to test the economic case, and HR needs to ensure roles, skills, staffing, and employee experience evolve along with the technology.”

This research was produced in collaboration with SkillsRight, a nonprofit organization that aligns workforce strategy, organizational capability, and change management to help employers translate skills-first commitments into scalable systems, practices, and talent pipelines.

About The Conference Board

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