Agentic Operating Model
How organisations move from a human-only operating model to one in which people, agents, automation and systems share the work – with accountability staying with people.
Read the parts in order for the full argument, or start with the section that matches your question. Each section begins with what you need to know from the parts before it.
Contents
Why Why it matters
Most agent programmes start with a list of agents – and get stuck in pilots. These two parts explain why the better starting point is what the organisation must be able to do, and what becomes scarce once agents make execution cheap. No prior knowledge needed.
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Part 1: Which Agents Should We Build? Why It's the Wrong Question
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Part 2: Execution Gets Cheap: What Shifts Strategically
What What changes
If you are starting here, three ideas from the first two parts are enough:
- Start from capabilities – what the organisation must reliably be able to do – not from a list of agents.
- When agents make execution cheap, the bottleneck moves to decisions, assurance, knowledge and proof.
- Work is shared between people, agents, automation and systems – and accountability always stays with people.
These three parts show how work is redesigned, how the organisation is built around it, and how autonomy is earned.
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Part 3: Capabilities, Not Processes: Re-implement, Don't Just Automate
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Part 4: The Model and the People: Six Building Blocks, and Agents in the Organisation
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Part 5: Autonomy Is Earned: Governance, Controls and Regulation as a Design Input
How How it works
These two parts turn the model into architecture and platform. The terms you need:
- Capability and outcome – an ability the organisation needs in many processes, and the result it delivers in each case.
- Seven decisions – every step of today’s work is kept, reinterpreted, automated, given to an agent or a person, eliminated, or turned into evidence.
- Autonomy levels – set per action, from inform to supervised autonomy, and earned with evidence.
- Evidence-by-design – proof created while the work happens, not assembled afterwards.
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Part 6: Making It Work: The Architecture Behind the Model
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Part 7: Building It on Microsoft: Platform, Control Plane and the Path Ahead