I’ve been around long enough to see every major shift in workplace technology spark the same reaction: panic.
I saw it when we moved work to the cloud. When we started using AI in search and knowledge discovery. When we replaced spreadsheets with shared docs. And now, with the rise of AI agents, I’m seeing it again.
The question always comes fast: Will this technology take my job?
Here’s my answer for today’s version of this existential question: AI agents won’t replace you. But someone using them might.
That’s not a threat—it’s a wake-up call. Because this generation of AI isn’t about automation. It’s about amplification and impact.
Meet the new MVP of work: The AI glue guy
To explain what I mean, let me borrow an analogy from sports. I’ve long admired athletes like former NBA swingman Andre Iguodala—those who don’t lead the league in stats but are absolutely essential to their teams. They rebound. They defend. They communicate. They make the players around them better. That’s why Iggy was named the NBA Finals MVP in 2015—he did the gritty, overlooked work that held the Warriors together.
In basketball, they call that kind of player the “glue guy.”
That’s what AI agents are at work. They’re the glue guys of the modern team—not the stars, but the silent difference-makers. They fill in the gaps. They keep everything connected. They help people accomplish their work faster, more accurately, and better.
Take one of the companies my team at GrowthLoop recently partnered with—Allegro, widely considered the “Amazon of Eastern Europe.” It’s using a tool of ours that’s powered by agentic AI and sits on top of its data cloud. Instead of jumping between disconnected tools, its marketers now work alongside a team of specialized AI agents: one understands data, another builds optimized journeys, others surface insights, suggest audiences, and brainstorm campaign ideas.
All of it happens from a single interface, like a command center for modern marketing. The agents don’t replace the humans—they empower them. The result? A 2X lift in return on ad spend. A 60% jump in gross merchandise value. A nearly 70% drop in cost per click.
That’s not job replacement. That’s job transformation.
And the best part? It’s just getting started.
We’ve seen this dynamic play out before. At my previous company, we introduced Glean—a tool I helped launch that transformed how teams discover knowledge inside their companies—and it was the same story. People feared overload. But what they found was a faster path to the right information, and more time for real problem-solving. That’s the story of every major breakthrough in tech: first, fear. Then, productivity. Then, progress.
What makes AI agents feel different is how fast they’re evolving. These models don’t just automate left-brain tasks like math and scheduling anymore. They now handle right-brain tasks—creativity, language, strategy. But the real breakthrough is their ability to reason in real time and personalize results. These agents aren’t just tools—they’re strategic partners. They process data faster than any human, spot patterns we’d miss, and suggest options we might never consider.
We’ve already seen this shift across industries. Developers are using AI to generate code and spot bugs faster. Customer support teams are delivering personalized answers in seconds because agents are stitching together past interactions in the background. Creative teams are testing and iterating on campaigns without waiting weeks for results.
None of this makes AI scary or removes the need for humans. It eliminates the drudgery.
Look inside any large company and you’ll find a mountain of work that’s pure busywork. Layers of reporting, status updates, and manual coordination consume massive amounts of time—what Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index calls “work about work,” which eats up to 60% of a person’s day. All of those hours add up to huge amounts of lost time. It’s modern-day “TPS reports” (from Office Space) on repeat. But AI agents change that. Imagine if, for every project, a crisp three-bullet summary was auto-generated and shared weekly—no chasing, no compiling. Now your product manager can spend time with customers, not decks. Your marketing lead can focus on creative, not cobbling data from five tools. These agents aren’t stealing jobs; they’re freeing people to do the work that actually matters.
Are some jobs going to change? Absolutely. But show me an era when they didn’t. The top jobs today didn’t even exist 20 years ago. Prompt engineer. Data strategist. AI agent supervisor. There’s a whole new category of work emerging around how we guide, govern, and collaborate with these systems.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, especially with how fast things are moving. But speed doesn’t have to mean chaos. In fact, AI agents can help tame the chaos, especially for companies buried under decades of siloed data, legacy tools, and fragmented workflows. They’re the connective tissue, the missing link. The glue.
And here’s the thing about glue guys: They don’t ask for the spotlight. They just make the team better.
The future of work is a team sport
If you’re a leader reading this, I encourage you to start getting familiar with new technology where humans and agents collaborate, much the same way as human teams do today. Ask yourself what are the low-value, repetitive tasks that no one likes doing.
The workforce is more adaptable than we give it credit for. History shows that when people are given new tools, they find new ways to work. The same will happen here. We’ll invent jobs we haven’t thought of yet. We’ll solve problems we once considered unsolvable. We’ll build teams where everyone, human or agent, plays to their strengths.
If I had 10 seconds in front of every employee at a Fortune 500 company, here’s what I’d say: You’re not going to lose your job to AI agents. You’re going to lose it to someone who knows how to collaborate with them really well. So embrace it. Learn it. Use it to make your work better—and more human. There’s no bounds to human ingenuity. Agents will help reduce the distance from idea to impact.
Because in this new era of work, the most powerful move you can make is to play like a team. And your team will only benefit from having glue guys.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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