Human-AI Collaboration: The Rise of Agentic Organizations
In today's business world, speed isn't the only issue; perhaps the real challenge is managing complexity, reading uncertainty, and adapting in real time.
Agile is still an indispensable foundation for this very reason. Organizing teams around value, making iterative learning a culture, breaking down cross-functional walls... these are the essential starter pack for today's modern organization.
However, we are now at a new threshold. The world is moving faster than human coordination can keep up with. Signals, needs, customers, and market conditions are changing so rapidly that simply being Agile is no longer enough to keep organizations afloat.
Organizations now need to transform into fluid structures where human intelligence and artificial intelligence agents work together. That's why I define Agentic Organizations as a necessary evolution built upon Agile. Transitioning to an agentic structure without the team-centricity, customer focus, and rapid learning capabilities that Agile provides is hardly feasible. When you build on these foundations with human-AI collaboration, fluid team networks, and AI-first value streams, I believe we can say that organizations have entered an entirely new league.
Why Agile Organizations?
In my previous article, I defined Agile Organizations as living organisms.
In this article, let's use a more concrete analogy. Think of Agile organizations as a well-organized basketball team. The game flows, everyone knows what to do. Agentic organizations, on the other hand, are like that same team playing with an AI teammate that performs real-time analysis on the field. What does this “teammate” do?
- Instantly identifies the opponent's weaknesses,
- Optimizes offense & defense sets,
- Generates decision options based on real-time data,
- Monitors player performance and provides recommendations.
Players are still at the center of the game, but now they have a real-time working mind by their side (and soon, AI will be able to score on the field too, of course ). Agentic Organization can be roughly described like this: an organism powered by human creativity and AI processing power.
As Jurgen Appelo also emphasizes in his Agentic Organization approach, these new structures are distributed networks of talent shaped around value and context rather than fixed roles. And the main driver of this fluidity is the speed, foresight, and reshaping capacity that artificial intelligence brings to teams.
Three Key Factors in Becoming an Agentic Organization
This transformation is not a “project” but rather an organism update. The following three factors can be thought of as the skeletal system that enables the organization to transform into an agentic structure. Each is not merely technical or procedural but represents areas of transformation that change the “nature” of the organism.
1️⃣ Humans & AI: Creating Collaboration
I believe that the starting point for agentic transformation is not technology, but human psychology. Because as far as I can see, everyone has the same question in their minds: “Will artificial intelligence take my place?”
Without transforming this question, it is hardly possible for an organization to become agentic. The magic question that transforms it is: “How can I become stronger with artificial intelligence?” To answer this question:
- Everyone must have basic AI usage skills,
- The practice of human-AI collaboration must be embedded in daily work and processes,
- Leaders must adopt “above the loop” behaviors, meaning they must embrace the role of managing the flow of work rather than doing the work themselves,
- The organization must reinterpret itself as a “continuously learning organism.”
I believe these are the key transformation points.
2️⃣ Working Model: Designing Fluid, Adaptable Team Networks
My observation in the Agile structures I have been part of so far is that approximately 20–30% of the organization would be reshaped in some way within 18–24 months. The market is volatile, goals are volatile... Given this situation, it is unreasonable to expect an organizational design or certain teams to remain unchanged for years. However, in today's world of increasing uncertainty, organizations must also accelerate their response speed. Therefore, with the advantages brought by AI, it would not be wrong to say that agentic organizations will have a much faster, perhaps even a few months' worth, ability to reshape themselves.
To understand this, it is sufficient to think of the organization as a “nervous system.”
- When an alert comes in,
- When a customer need arises,
- When an error signal is generated...
The team structure of an agentic organization can automatically reorganize itself. Just like our body's micro-level healing reflex in response to injury. Jurgen Appelo's networked organizations approach is exactly this: as goals change, as context changes, the organization also restructures itself. This structure replaces the “major change every three years” approach we see in classic reorganizations with a period of continuous micro-reorganization.
3️⃣ Business Model: Designing AI-First Value Streams
It would be a big mistake to view this step through the lens of “process automation.” The essence of an agentic organization is to redesign the value stream. Therefore:
- Identify and redesign critical workflows from scratch,
- Integrate AI agents into the redesign to create a new structure,
This will reveal the contribution AI can make most quickly. The potential mistake here is to take existing workflows as they are, without rethinking them, and try to enhance them with AI. However, the cards are being reshuffled; we can accelerate not by automating our old way of working, but by redefining our work from scratch.
In summary, we are faced with a new way of working built on Agile, one that is faster and smarter...
Agile team → A unit that owns value end-to-end
Agentic team → An autonomous organism that operates with value created by humans + AI agents
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