I help the Chief People Officer to
put agentic AI to Work
No shift has lifted the Chief People Officer into prominence like this one, and none has been so quickly assumed to be someone else's to lead. Thirty-six years on both sides of the executive table, advising chief executives from the outside and running People and Culture from the inside, and I have not seen anything like it.
Agentic AI redraws what a manager is for, what mastery means, and who your people get to become at work. Automation was never the hard part.
That is culture, and culture is yours. Before the Fingerprint Fades is my case for leading it.
LATEST ARTICLE - 16 July 2026 -Find Link Here
The Chief People Officer Puts Agentic AI to Work:
What to Know, What to Do
Your organisation chart is a faithful description of the Information Age, and the work has already begun leaving it.
This paper answers three questions I hear again and again from Chief People Officers. What are the thought leaders saying about the role? Why is almost everyone's AI spending underperforming? Where do I start in the next twelve months?
Agentic AI is a workforce question rather than a tooling one, so the paper walks your Talent Cycle through four ages: Industrial, Information, Irrelevance, and Ingenuity. It measures Ingenuity Readiness on VISTA and ORG6. It offers ten challenges and a month by month for 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027. IBM, Moderna, Salesforce, IKEA, and Schneider Electric are already running it.
It expands the CPO chapter of Before the Fingerprint Fades. A living paper, an introduction rather than a verdict. Tell me where I have it wrong.
This year, 2026, the successful organisations will move to Agentic AI, but it is not just the technology that will drive success. . . . . . .
The Chief People Officer Partners with the
Chief AI Officer to Create Ingenuity
The Chief People Officer facilitates leadership and culture. 70% of AI success traces there, not to the technology.
The AI Era calls for end-to-end reconstruction.
Structure.
Capability.
Roles.
Learning & Development.
Career Architecture.
Every one of them rebuilt.
McKinsey, Rewired, 2nd Ed., 2026
And most of your employees will not
have experienced what Agentic AI is yet
So . . . Now What Does
the Chief People Officer do facing into
Agentic AI?
- Build broad AI fluency
across the leadership team — not an army of prompt engineers, it's too early to specialise - Teach every manager to map their process
end to end and spot where the handoffs and bottlenecks sit - Rotate your best people
through three to five live agentic pilots on real problems, not lab exercises - Raise what you expect of leaders
now — judgment under ambiguity, comfort supervising a workflow they don't personally execute, cross-functional orchestration - Staying clear-headed about the hype is one job. Getting ready for the shift is another.
Most organisations will not manage both, and the Chief People Officer is the one placed to see why: readiness shows up in people long before it shows up in the technology.
Activities this year that I am doing that help the
Chief People Officer and their team
- October, Melbourne.
An evening briefing, then a six-hour masterclass the next day, in the first fortnight of October. - October, Sydney.
The same evening briefing and the six-hour masterclass, one week apart from Melbourne. - The podcast.
A Chief People Officer a week, in their own words, launching in November. The guest seats are filling now. - A conversation.
You, or you and your team, confidential, at a time that suits you. - The weekly newsletter.
One email a week on what the Chief People Officer needs to know and do with agentic AI. - The daily essays.
On my Substack, one question at a time, most weekdays. - News of my next book.
The Chief People Officer Puts Agentic AI to Work, arriving late 2026, fed by all of the above.
