Eighty-two per cent of HR leaders plan to deploy agentic AI within the next twelve months, and Gartner finds most of their teams lack even a foundational understanding of what an agent is. Hold those two facts together for a moment. The function built to care for people is about to run a workforce that is partly machines, at a pace no one asked us to set, and the missing line in every AI business case your organisation has signed is the readiness of its leadership and culture to receive the technology. That line is your line. No one else at the table owns it.

The distinction that changes everything is short. Chat AI answers when asked. Agentic AI acts: it monitors your data, reasons about causes, and executes within the limits you set, and the moment AI moves from answering to acting it stops being a tooling question and becomes a workforce question, because every agent needs what every employee needs: a position description, delegation limits, a supervisor, and a way to learn. That is people work.

Meanwhile the money is moving and the returns are not. MIT finds 95 per cent of AI pilots deliver no measurable impact, and even BCG concedes that 70 per cent of AI success comes from organisation, workforce, and skills. The reason is not the models. Technology amplifies the system it meets, and pointed at a fearful, siloed, exhausted culture it industrialises the fear, the silos, and the exhaustion. Readiness runs on two axes, your leadership and culture on one, the strategy of deployment on the other, and you already own the first. It has been your life's work. The question is whether you will claim the second.

So I carry one question into every conversation: what must the Chief People Officer now know, do, and become, to lead the redesign of work, talent, and culture? I am meeting Australia's most senior Chief People Officers one by one, while working with the builders constructing the agents, because the answer lies in joining the two: the lived experience of the people in the role and the expertise of the people building the technology. And I work beside CPOs and their teams inside their own organisations: helping CPOs redesign the work, reposition the talent, and rebuild the culture, harnessing the exponentially expanding capability of agentic AI around what only people provide, starting now.

The full argument is in my article, The Chief People Officer Puts Agentic AI to Work: What to Know, What to Do: the research, the vocabulary, five people processes walked through four ages, and a month-by-month year ahead. Tick what interests you below, and I will send it to you.

Seven ways in

October, Melbourne. An evening briefing, then a six-hour masterclass the next day, in the first fortnight of October.

October, Sydney. The same pair, the 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 the next book. The Chief People Officer Puts Agentic AI to Work, arriving late 2026, fed by all of the above.