The central challenge, then, lies in rethinking how people, processes, and technology work together.
Across industries as different as customer experience and agricultural equipment, the identical pattern is emerging: Traditional organizational structures—centralized decision-making, fragmented workflows, data spread across incompatible systems—are proving too rigid to support agentic AI. To unlock value, leaders must rethink how decisions are made, how work is executed, and what humans should uniquely contribute.
“It is extremely essential that humans proceed to confirm the content. And that’s where you are going to see more energy being put into,” Ryan Peterson, EVP and chief product officer at Concentrix.
Much of the conversation centered on what will be described as the following major unlock: operationalizing human-AI collaboration. Slightly than positioning AI as a standalone tool or a “virtual employee,” this approach reframes AI as a system-level capability that augments human judgment, accelerates execution, and reimagines work from end to finish. That shift requires organizations to map the worth they wish to create; design workflows that mix human oversight with AI-driven automation; and construct the information, governance, and security foundations that make these systems trustworthy.
“My advice could be to expect some delays because you want to be sure you secure the information,” says Heidi Hough, VP for North America aftermarket at Valmont. “As you consider commercializing or operationalizing any piece of using AI, for those who start from ground zero and have governance on the forefront, I believe that may help with outcomes.”
Early adopters are already showing what this looks like in practice: starting with low-risk operational use cases, shaping data into tightly scoped enclaves, embedding governance into on a regular basis decision-making, and empowering business leaders, not only technologists, to discover where AI can create measurable impact. The result’s a brand new blueprint for AI maturity grounded in reengineering how modern enterprises operate.
“Optimization is absolutely about doing existing things higher, but reimagination is about discovering entirely latest things which are price doing,” says Hung.
