Last week I spoke at the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) and Henley Business School's annual South East conference in Cookham, a beautiful village beside the Thames.
The day began with a dawn run along the river, contemplating the conference theme: The Human Edge – When AI is everywhere, what wins?
Following Alastair Banks's superb presentation on personal branding, I shared how my own professional focus has evolved: from building content production agents for TechPros.io in 2023/24, to launching CogniScale.com as an AI training business helping client marketing teams adopt Claude, and more recently developing it into an agent orchestration platform.
After interesting talks from Dr. Emine Gokce Phillips and Melissa Ezechukwu we were joined by Marie Wilcox and Kamila Miller (CMCIM) for a panel discussion on the conference theme.
There was broad agreement that taste, judgement, empathy, trust-building and other distinctly human qualities will become increasingly important as AI takes on more of our work.
But I disagreed with one suggestion: that organisations will need new roles dedicated to orchestrating AI agents.
I think we're heading in precisely the opposite direction.
We'll all become orchestrators of our own AI agents, both personal and shared.
Do organisations need the right platform, appropriate governance and training in a common methodology for working with personal agents, shared AI colleagues and automations? Absolutely.
But someone to manage everyone else's agents? I don't think so. That adds friction and unnecessary cost.
‘Agentic AI’ is a new term and sounds technical, perhaps even scary. But once people are trained to build and work with agents, the basics are fairly straightforward: give them access to quality data and the right skills, set clear goals and guidelines, then review and improve the outputs.
These, along with talking instead of typing, are the skills teams need to develop. In principle, they're not particularly difficult.
The mindset shift is the more challenging bit.
Tim Bond is the founder of CogniScale, which helps teams work with AI colleagues and measures what changes.
