Insight
From managers to agents: Intelligence on tap is transforming leadership
By Chaitra Vedullapalli
What if intelligence was no longer something you hired, but something you accessed—like electricity, water, cloud storage or bandwidth?
Take a moment to sink in.
After listening to Sam Altman’s TED Talk on the democratisation of intelligence, Jensen Huang on Rebuilding Industrial Power and Satya Nadella’s keynote at Microsoft Build, it became crystal clear to me: we’ve entered a new era of workforce design—one powered not just by people, but by intelligence on tap.
Intelligence on Tap.
Like electricity.
Like cloud storage.
Like bandwidth.
Expertise becomes a utility—not something you hire, but something you access.
When you combine that idea with AI agents capable of planning, reasoning, and taking action, the ripple effects are seismic. For people. For organisations. For society.
And this reshapes everything we thought we knew about careers, teams, and leadership.
Rethinking the Organisation Itself
For decades, intelligence was a scarce resource—limited by human time, cost, and capacity. But that constraint is vanishing.
With AI agents that can reason, plan, and execute, intelligence is no longer confined to employees. It’s becoming scalable, on-demand, and ambient—a capacity you access, not employ.
So if your people can build the intelligence they need, why are you still organising around job titles and departments?
Drawing on global insights from 31,000 workers, LinkedIn data, and trillions of Microsoft 365 signals—alongside real conversations with startups, economists, and researchers—Microsoft sketches out a new model: the Frontier Firm.
These are agile organisations that:
- Move faster
- Scale smarter
- Organise by outcome, not hierarchy
Frontier Firms are already taking shape, and within the next 2–5 years we expect that every organisation will be on their journey to becoming one.
82 per cent of leaders say this is a pivotal year to rethink key aspects of strategy and operations, and 81 per cent say they expect agents to be moderately or extensively integrated into their company’s AI strategy in the next 12–18 months.
Adoption is accelerating: 24 per cent of leaders say their companies have already deployed AI organisation-wide, while just 12 per cent remain in pilot mode.
They’re structured not around job titles—but around Work Charts: fluid, task-focused teams that form around what needs to be done.
You don’t build teams—you orchestrate them.
And who manages this new blend of human and machine workforces?
Not HR as we know it. But a new function: Intelligence Resources—a fusion of HR and IT.
A team responsible for staffing hybrid teams, managing the human-agent ratio, and ensuring performance, oversight, and trust.
Why Managers Are Ahead of the Curve
As Colette Stallbaumer, GM of Microsoft 365 Copilot and Co-Founder of WorkLab, put it:
“Leaders recognise they can’t afford to sit on the sidelines.”
Managers are leading the AI shift because:
- They’re the first expected to deliver ROI on AI
- They already know how to delegate, coach, and course-correct
- They’re used to managing performance—now they just manage both people and machines
In short: we don’t need to reinvent management—we need to redirect it.
From Coworkers to Agent Bosses
The individual is at the center of this transformation.
We’re not just learning to use AI—we’re learning to manage it. To delegate. To refine. To override when needed. To lead a team of digital workers—agents who work for us.
The new archetype of this era: The Agent Boss.
Not the solo expert. Not the traditional manager. But the one who scales their impact through a crew of AI teammates.
You delegate. You optimise. You ship outcomes.
The career ladder? It’s been replaced with a launchpad.
A junior employee managing 10 intelligent agents can now deliver senior-level results.
What used to take years of experience now takes systems intelligence—and the curiosity to learn how to build your first agent.
“Now everyone can be an agent boss,” says Stallbaumer. “Think of your work like you’re the CEO of your own startup.”
What It Takes to Be an Agent Boss
Becoming an Agent Boss isn’t just about knowing how AI works. It’s about mastering how to lead with AI.
It requires a framework to delegate tasks effectively. It requires oversight to ensure quality. It requires regular reviews to tune performance.
It requires ethical reflection to act with caution. It requires evaluation to measure impact.
After experimenting with this strategy in our own team, we identified three weekly metrics that ensure we adapt with precision, caution, and excitement:
Adoption Rate: How many agents and workflows are now powered by agents? and how many tools are we using?
Outcome Quality: Are the results generated by agents meeting or exceeding expectations?
Team Sentiment: Are people feeling empowered or overwhelmed?
Mastering these rhythms transforms chaos into clarity—and helps every professional scale their expertise with confidence.
This is the new literacy. The new fluency. The new foundation.
So, What Agent Boss Skills I Believe We Need To Master:
Prompt Engineering & Contextual Framing: Craft prompts that enable reasoning and memory. Train agents to understand context, tone, and objectives.
Workflow Automation: Identify repetitive or rules-based tasks and deploy AI to streamline them.
Agent Delegation: Learn how to assign work to multiple agents and manage inter-agent coordination.
Human-Agent Oversight: Know when to review, refine, or override outputs. Maintain governance and ethics.
System Integration: Connect AI agents to your existing cloud tools, CRMs, calendars, and databases.
Performance Evaluation: Track KPIs for AI agents. Learn how to tune and retrain them for improved outcomes.
Ethical and Secure Use of AI: Understand data privacy, model bias, and safe usage protocols.
Team Orchestration: Manage blended teams of people and agents to deliver coordinated value.
Business Case Development: Build a compelling use case for why a human+agent team accelerates growth.
First Agent Launch: From idea to implementation: go live with your first working AI agent workforce
Why This Moment Matters
This isn’t theory. It’s here. Most of us are still using the old language of work:
- Measuring output by job description, not impact
- Designing teams for predictability, not adaptability
- Waiting for permission to experiment when the risk is now inaction
But the map has changed.
Intelligence is no longer what you hire. It’s what you deploy.
It’s time to ask:
- What kind of org do you want to work for—or build?
- What kind of manager are you when your team includes agents?
- What kind of career are you building when success means scaling your mind, not just your hours?
Take a breath. Let it land.
Intelligence is now on tap. And those who know how to turn it on—will lead.
Join Women in Cloud ecosystem to be part of the transformation. Don’t leave behind.
Find out more about Women in Cloud at womenincloud.com
GSK said its ovarian cancer drug shrank or cleared tumours in more than 60 per cent of patients in an early trial as CCO Luke Miels pushes faster development.
The company said that in an early-stage trial, Mocertatug Rezetecan, known as Mo-Rez, shrank or eliminated tumours in 62 per cent of patients with ovarian cancer after chemotherapy had failed, and in 67 per cent of those with endometrial cancer.
Hesham Abdullah, GSK’s global head of cancer research and development, said: “Treatment of gynaecological cancers remains a major challenge, with a pressing need for new therapies that offer improved response rates.
“With Mo-Rez we now have compelling evidence of a promising clinical profile.”
GSK acquired the Mo-Rez treatment, an antibody-drug conjugate, from China’s Hansoh Pharma in late 2023 and has trialled it in 224 patients around the world, including the UK, over the past year.
Only a few patients needed to stop treatment because of side effects, the most common being nausea.
It is given every three weeks by intravenous infusion, meaning directly into a vein.
Combined with data from a separate intermediate trial in China, the results have given the British drugmaker the confidence to go straight to late-stage trials, with five clinical studies planned globally in the next few months, including on patients in the UK.
Speaking to journalists before the conference, Abdullah described Mo-Rez as a “key asset” in the company’s growing cancer portfolio.
It is expected to be a blockbuster drug, with peak annual sales of more than £2bn, which GSK hopes will help it achieve its 2031 sales target of £40bn.
A few years ago GSK did not have any cancer drugs on the market, but it now has four approved medicines and 13 in clinical development.
Last year, oncology generated nearly £2bn in sales, up 43 per cent from 2024, with sales of its endometrial cancer drug Jemperli rising 89 per cent.
Self-employment is linked to lower rates of high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, poor health and binge drinking in Hispanic women, research suggests.
The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Ethnicity & Disease, suggest work structure may be related to cardiovascular disease risk among this group.
Dr Kimberly Narain is assistant professor of medicine in the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, senior author of the study, and director of health services and health optimisation research for the Iris Cantor-UCLA Women’s Health Center.
She said: “Hispanic women experience a disproportionate burden of heart disease compared to non-Hispanic women. This is the first study to link the structure of work with risks for heart disease among this group of women.”
The researchers examined 2003 to 2022 data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to assess the association between self-employment, cardiovascular disease risk factors and health outcomes for Hispanic women.
The data included 165,600 Hispanic working women. Of those, about 21,000, or 13 per cent, were self-employed rather than working for wages or a salary.
Overall, the researchers found that self-employed women were less likely to report cardiovascular-disease-associated health problems.
They were also about 11 per cent more likely to report exercising compared with their non-self-employed counterparts.
Specifically, they found that self-employed Hispanic women had a 1.7 percentage point lower chance of reporting diabetes, roughly a 23 per cent decline.
They also had a 3.3 percentage point lower chance of reporting hypertension, roughly a 17 per cent decline.
The study also found a 5.9 percentage point lower chance of reporting obesity, roughly a 15 per cent decline.
It found a 2.0 percentage point lower chance of reporting binge drinking, roughly a 2 per cent decline.
It also found a 2.5 percentage point lower chance of reporting poor or fair overall health, roughly a 13 per cent decline.
The relationship between heart disease risks and the structure of work among Hispanic women was not driven by access to healthcare or differences in income, Narain said.
In fact, the decrease in high blood pressure linked to self-employment was nearly as large as the decrease in high blood pressure linked to being in the highest income group.
The study has some limitations.
The researchers relied on self-reported outcomes, which might be less reliable among ethnic and racial minorities and those from a lower socioeconomic background.
In addition, the researchers’ definition of poor mental health does not entirely match the accepted definition in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
They also did not have data allowing them to examine the specific types of occupations held by the women.
The study design also cannot prove any causal relationship between self-employment and cardiovascular disease risk, which is a subject the researchers will explore.
“The next step in the research is to conduct studies that are able to better assess if the structure of work is a cause of higher heart disease risks among Hispanic women.”
Narain said this.
Study co-authors are Lisette Collins, who led the research, and Dr Frederick Ferguson of UCLA.
Grants from the Iris Cantor-UCLA Women’s Health Center-Leichtman-Levine-TEM program and the UCLA National Clinician Scholars Program supported the research.
Working from home is linked to 0.32 more children per woman when both partners do it at least once a week, research across 38 countries suggests.
The study found that among working adults aged 20 to 45, estimated lifetime fertility, meaning children already born or fathered plus plans for future children, rises when one or both partners work remotely.
In the US, the increase was even higher at 0.45 children per woman.
On average, women whose partners did not work from home had 2.26 children.
When the woman worked from home at least one day a week, this rose to 2.48. When both partners did so, it increased to 2.58.
If the man worked from home at least one day a week, the increase was more limited at 2.36 children.
The research, by Steven J. Davis and colleagues and published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, points to three possible explanations.
Remote working may make it easier to balance childcare with paid work, leading some couples to have more children.
Families with children may also be more likely to look for remote roles. Or the growing availability of those roles may lift fertility by opening up more parent-friendly jobs.
“All three stories align with the idea that WFH jobs make it easier for parents to combine child rearing and employment,” the report suggests.
The pattern held both after the pandemic, between 2023 and 2025, and before it, between 2017 and 2019.
The implications for national fertility rates vary mainly because working-from-home rates differ widely between countries.
Among workers aged 20 to 45, the share working from home at least one day a week ranges from 21 per cent in Japan to 60 per cent in Vietnam. The UK ranks third globally and leads Europe at 54 per cent.
The report estimates that, if “interpreted causally”, remote working accounts for 8.1 per cent of US fertility, equal to about 291,000 births a year as of 2024.
The researchers note that while this may sound modest, it is larger than the effect of government spending on early childhood care and education in the US.
“Bringing WFH rates to the levels that currently prevail in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada has the potential to materially boost fertility in many other countries,” the report suggests.
However, the research cautions against broad policy approaches, saying the desire for remote work varies widely between individuals, and that it is not practical in every job or organisation.
“Thus, policy interventions that push for a one-size-fits-all approach to working arrangements are likely to yield unhappier workers and lower productivity,” it warns.
A UK Parliament report has also found that remote and hybrid work can boost employment, with parents, carers and people with disabilities likely to benefit most from more flexible working options.
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