A Primer on AI Agents...and Why You Should Care
A weekly round-up of news, perspectives, predictions, and provocations as we travel the world of AI-augmented work.
AI agents might sound like something for your IT people to worry about. But if you’re a business leader or HR professional, it’s something you need to pay very serious attention to as they are going to change your world, profoundly affecting how work gets done, how teams are built, and how your people are managed, trained and supported.
Intelligent agents are not merely chatbots or static tools that respond to commands. They are complex, adaptive systems built on large language models (LLMs), capable of reasoning, learning, and even collaborating. In a recent study titled, Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test, researchers has participants hold 5 minute conversations with GPT-4.5; when they were asked to guess who was the real human and who was the AI, 73% picked GPT-4.5.
Organizations looking to stay competitive in an AI-augmented future need to understand how they work, how to evaluate them, and how to manage these agents as they’re integrated into the workforce. According to a recent survey titled “Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems,” we are standing on the threshold of a dramatic shift in how AI interacts with our organizations—not just at the system level, but across workflows, teams, and leadership itself.
The following draws from the survey and its findings in breaking down what AI agents really are, how they’re built, how to prepare for the impact of agents that learn, adapt, collaborate, and evolve within the enterprise, and why having this understanding is essential for business leaders, HR professionals, and anyone shaping the future of work.
From Engines to Agents
Think of today’s large language models (LLMs) like the engines of a (non self-driving) car: powerful, fast, and impressively versatile. But, to state the obvious, they aren’t cars. On their own, they don’t know where to go, what to do, or how to respond when conditions change. That’s where AI agents come in. According to the Foundation Agents survey, agents are the "vehicles"—intelligent systems built on top of LLMs that can remember, reason, plan, and act. They are designed not just to respond, but to initiate, adapt, and collaborate.
These systems are modeled on the human brain. They include memory, perception, reward processing, and emotion-like modules—all working together in a cognitive framework that mimics how humans navigate the world. The survey emphasizes a modular architecture: separate but interconnected systems that process information, make decisions, and evolve over time. This structure is more than an academic idea—it’s a practical roadmap for developing AI agents that can integrate into business workflows, assist human workers, and in some cases, take on significant operational roles.
Building Blocks: What Makes an AI Agent?
The Foundation Agents survey outlines four major areas of development:
Brain-Inspired Modularity: Like a human brain, agents include components for perception, memory, world modeling, and emotional feedback. These allow agents to understand their environment, recall relevant data, make decisions, and even simulate empathy.
Self-Enhancement and Continuous Learning: Intelligent agents can refine themselves through automated optimization—think of it as AI managing its own upskilling. Using techniques like AutoML and LLM-driven learning, agents can evolve without manual reprogramming.
Multi-Agent Collaboration: Just like humans, agents don’t operate in a vacuum. They can form teams, build consensus, and divide tasks. This has huge implications for project management, customer service, and creative work.
AI agents won’t just supplement existing communication patterns; they’ll create new pathways for information flow—potentially accelerating innovation, improving decision-making, and breaking down silos. Philip Arkcoll, Founder Worklytics
4. Safety, Ethics, and Alignment: As AI systems become more autonomous, the need for oversight grows. The survey delves into intrinsic and extrinsic threats—from bias and error to security and misuse—and offers strategies for building resilient, ethically grounded agents.
What is the Emotional Impact on Teams When AI Acts as a Teammate?
AI agents will increasingly become part of your workforce, whether as virtual assistants, training facilitators, performance monitors, or workflow coordinators. That means HR must begin to think of AI agents not just as tools, but as participants in organizational culture.
Questions that traditionally apply to humans—onboarding, feedback, development, alignment with mission and values—will soon need to apply to agents. Are they ethical? Are they improving team dynamics or harming them? Are they learning and evolving in alignment with company goals? These aren’t far-fetched questions. They’re directly raised in the survey, which calls attention to the need for secure, aligned, and beneficial AI systems.
As organizations entrust agents with more, for lack of a better word, agency, and decision-making, the questions becomes: how will this affect the employee experience? What are the potential emotional impacts and what can HR do to mitigate them? Per Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick, this question is at the center of a randomized controlled trial of 776 professionals at Procter and Gamble. The results were published in a paper titled The Cybernetic Teammate: A Field Experiment on Generative AI Reshaping Teamwork and Expertise.
A particularly surprising finding was how AI affected the emotional experience of work. Technological change, and especially AI, has often been associated with reduced workplace satisfaction and increased stress. But our results showed the opposite, at least in this case.
People using AI reported significantly higher levels of positive emotions (excitement, energy, and enthusiasm) compared to those working without AI. They also reported lower levels of negative emotions like anxiety and frustration. Individuals working with AI had emotional experiences comparable to or better than those working in human teams.
That’s good news. But, as the survey warns, it’s not a “set it and forget it” situation - for intelligent agents to be trustworthy and effective, they require careful integration, contextual awareness, and most critically—human oversight. HR and business leaders must partner with technical teams to ensure that AI agents align with organizational values and enhance—not disrupt—team cohesion.
What You Can Do Today
Start by familiarizing yourself with the Foundation Agents survey. It’s one of the most comprehensive resources available on how AI agents are built, how they operate, and what challenges lie ahead. From understanding modular design to grasping the implications of collaborative AI, this material offers a critical primer for anyone leading in an AI-augmented workplace.
Second, begin a conversation inside your organization. What tasks might intelligent agents handle? Where could they reduce complexity, or support learning? What policies do you need to begin drafting now—on accountability, transparency, and collaboration?
Finally, reimagine workforce strategy. As AI agents become part of your talent mix, HR’s role will shift. The focus will not only be on managing people but on managing a human-machine ecosystem built for agility, trust, and impact.
Beyond the Tech: A Societal Shift
As the Foundation Agents survey concludes, intelligent agents will only be as ethical, effective, and empowering as the environments they’re placed in and the people who guide them. Business leaders who understand this—and who take the time to learn how agents work, evolve, and interact—will have a significant advantage. The organizations that thrive in the coming era will be those with the smartest strategies for integrating machines into the rhythms of human work.
Our findings suggest AI sometimes functions more like a teammate than a tool. While not human, it replicates core benefits of teamwork—improved performance, expertise sharing, and positive emotional experiences. This teammate perspective should make organizations think differently about AI. It suggests a need to reconsider team structures, training programs, and even traditional boundaries between specialties. At least with the current set of AI tools, AI augments human capabilities. It democratizes expertise as well, enabling more employees to contribute meaningfully to specialized tasks and potentially opening new career pathways. From “One Useful Thing”
Episode 21: The Big Shift: A Hard Look at Soft Skills
This is the third in a series of talks with David Foote, founder of Foote Partners, on The Big Shift- several tectonic changes sweeping through the workplace and the workforce.
(One from the archives, in case you missed it!)
AIX Factor Poll
AI Gone Rogue
Tales of AI being unintentionally funny (i.e., woefully wrong), bizarre, creepy, (amusingly) scary, and/or just plain scary.
He was killed in a road rage incident. His family used AI to bring him to the courtroom to address his killer. Stacey Wales spent two years working on the victim impact statement she planned to give in court after her brother was shot to death in a 2021 road rage incident. But even after all that time, Wales felt her statement wouldn’t be enough to capture her brother Christopher Pelkey’s humanity and what he would’ve wanted to say. So, Wales decided to let Pelkey give the statement himself — with the help of artificial intelligence. Source: CNN
Anthropic just analyzed 700,000 Claude conversations — and found its AI has a moral code of its own. The study found that Claude generally adheres to Anthropic’s prosocial aspirations, emphasizing values like “user enablement,” “epistemic humility,” and “patient wellbeing” across diverse interactions. However, researchers also discovered troubling instances where Claude expressed values contrary to its training. Source: Venture Beat
AIX-emplary Links
Real-world use cases for agentic AI. According to Gartner, agentic AI is the top strategic trend of 2025. By 2029, 80% of common customer services issues will be resolved autonomously, without human intervention. The firm also predicts that 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI by 2028, and 15% of all day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously. Source: Computerworld
70% of skills used in most jobs will change within 5 years, LinkedIn report says. As workplaces usher in AI, various tasks of the job will evolve to ensure workers can be more productive. Source: CNBC
AI's Spontaneously Develop Social Norms Like Humans. Large language model (LLM) AI agents, when interacting in groups, can form shared social conventions without centralized coordination. More than three-quarters (77%) of global technology executives now trust robots to carry out core workplace functions, according to new research from embedded software provider QNX. Yet as businesses accelerate automation initiatives, many are encountering gaps in workplace readiness and employee confidence. Source: Neuroscience News
Moderna replacing junior HR analyst roles with AI, HR chief says. Moderna's Chief People & Digital Officer, Tracey Franklin, has become the latest high-profile executive to reveal how agentic AI is impacting jobs. Source: Technology & People
Rise of the bots: How can HR leaders prepare? | Employee Experience. HR's leadership role in robotics transformation. To truly unlock the power of this technology, we must prioritize a workplace culture of curiosity and innovation. Source: HR Grapevine
Google’s AI agent protocol is becoming the language for digital labor. Google’ open-source A2A protocol allows networks of agents to structurally set goals, reason, take action, and return results across clouds, enterprises, and data silos. Source: Computerworld
4 types of prompt injection attacks and how they work. Prompt injection attacks are widely considered the most dangerous of the techniques targeting AI systems. Source: Palo Alto Networks
A new AI model from MIT CSAIL researchers crafts smooth, high-quality videos in seconds. Source: MIT News
Does AI Have Free Will? New Study Says We’re Getting Close A new study argues that certain generative AI agents already meet the philosophical criteria for free will: agency, the capacity to choose, and control over actions. Drawing on functional free will theories from philosophers Daniel Dennett and Christian List, Martela analyzed two AI agents, Minecraft’s Voyager and fictional autonomous drones, and found they exhibit behaviors consistent with free will. Source: Neuroscience News
About
The AIX Files is a weekly newsletter providing news, perspectives, predictions, and provocations on the challenges of navigating the world of AI-augmented work. It’s a big topic and there’s a lot to cover. Our goal with this, the AIX Factor, and the broader AIX community is to promote - and, if necessary, provoke - illuminating conversations with a cross-section of business and technology leaders, as well as practitioners and people from diverse fields, on the ways AI intersects with leadership, culture, and learning. AIX was developed in association with HR.com.