Should you treat AI agents as colleagues? Fortune 500 executives can’t settle the debate

The debate over how to integrate AI agents into the workplace has produced no shortage of frameworks, mandates, and org-chart overhauls. And this week at Fortune’s COO Summit, it produced something rarer: complete, 180-degree disagreement between two executives who have thought about this longer than almost anyone, and still left with no clean resolution. Eric Kelleher, President and COO of Okta, has named the agents on his team Leo, Sloan, Hank, and Walker (among others). They show up in business reviews alongside his human staff. The turning point, he said, came during a standup when he asked staff to give names to their own agents. “In that exercise, AI became a colleague as opposed to a tool,” he told Fortune on the sidelines of the panel, “and that catalyst is valuable.” Francine Katsoudas, the Executive Vice President and Chief People, Policy & Purpose Officer at Cisco, heard something like that and pushed back hard. “I would not look at AI as a colleague,” she told a separate audience at the COO Summit just hours later. “I think we should look at AI and agents as part of the workflow, but not a colleague. And I think the sooner we land that, the more confident our people will be.” Both executives are operating at scale and are navigating the same underlying crisis: companies have largely figured out how to experiment with AI, but remain in experiment phase, if not in collective denial about how to actually redesign work around it. Cognizant, whose research team presented new data at the COO Summit, found that 93% of jobs are already being disrupted by AI—six years ahead of their own 2023 projections. But the productivity gains that were supposed to follow haven’t materialized. Their researchers called it an “activation gap.” The debate over what to call agents might sound is not just semantics. Katsoudas also talked to Fortune Editorial Director Kristin Stoller about how Cisco handled 4,0