The New Hybrid Workforce Reality

AI was hailed as the great empowerer. But people don’t feel empowered. They feel scared. Scared that AI will take their jobs and render them obsolete. Media coverage of the recent Microsoft, AWS, and HP layoffs has fueled the panic. But the real driver isn’t the news cycle. It’s the unknown.

Most people don’t yet understand what’s possible with agentics. They can’t imagine a workforce where humans and agents operate side by side. And because they can’t picture their place in this future, they start to question whether they have one.

The CIO as AI Storyteller

It is the CIO’s job to neutralize this fear by becoming a storyteller. Building the narrative that makes AI relevant to their organization. But to do that, we must fight our instincts. Because this is not a technology conversation. It is a business conversation. CIOs must dig deep into the operations of the business to identify where AI can accelerate, amplify, and transform.

A No-Fear Framework for Agentic Integration

Ahead of Nasuni’s agentic hackathon in October, I designed a framework to identify where agents would deliver the most impact:

1. Partner with People

Every enterprise is a constellation of capabilities: finance, technology, sales, marketing. To understand how each function operates – and where it could be improved – you need to partner with the domain experts who perform the work. Their lived experience is your source of truth.

2. Interrogate the Process

Beneath each capability are distinct engines. In IT, that’s data, security, infrastructure, and operations. Go a level deeper and you find more sub-layers. Under Security lies Governance Regulation Compliance (GRC), InfoSec, AppSec, and DevSecOps. Peel back the layers to expose the minute structures of each workflow.

3. Identify Opportunities

Once you have an operational map of the business, you are ready to identify the areas that can be influenced with AI. Scan for weak spots. This is where AI will increase efficiency, close a skills gap, reduce a risk, or improve an outcome.

4. Optimize with AI

Now layer in the utilities at your disposal. But beware: generative AI does not make an organization “AI-augmented”. The true value of a technology is only realized when it is embedded deeply into enterprise processes. AI shouldn’t shout. It should be silent.

5. Orchestrate Talent

If an agent is delivering against a business objective that a person is measured by, it is talent. And once agents are talent, the CIO becomes a talent orchestrator. Not managing headcount, but managing the capability – human and agent – needed to achieve enterprise goals.

How Agents Elevate Specialists to Engineers

Here is how we applied this framework to integrate agentics into Nasuni’s cybersecurity operations:

First, we deconstructed the Tier 1 InfoSec specialist’s day: fielding risks from SIEM, investigating incidents, threat hunting, and triage.

Next, we isolated the leading indicators that define their success: Mean Time To Detect, Mean Time To Review, and Mean Time To Resolution.

Then we built agents that could perform 90% of the repetitive work behind those metrics to reduce investigation time and mitigate threats faster.

Every dollar saved on routine work is a dollar invested in innovation. A specialist who is no longer drowning in their Tier 1 greywork is free to level up to Security Engineer. This isn’t theoretical. Several people on my team recently made this exact step up.

The Competitive Advantage of Being Human

Agentics won’t render humans obsolete. It will reallocate their work. People will stop executing processes and start inventing them. Stop fighting fires and start building firebreaks. Stop optimizing margins and start reinventing models.

The most effective teams will be hybrid in a whole new way: combining the efficiency of machines with the ingenuity of people. Agents will handle scale and execution, while humans focus on creativity and strategy. There will be fear. No state change is without it. But while uncertainty fuels fear, enlightenment drives excitement. It is CIOs who will lead their organizations into the light.

CIO Corner is the executive lens on what’s next in IT, delivered by Nasuni CIO, Dalan Winbush. With a firsthand perspective from the frontlines of IT leadership, Dalan unpacks what it really takes to modernize infrastructure, harness AI, and lead through complexity. This series tackles the hard questions CIOs face today, such as scalability, resilience, velocity, and value. It’s a candid look at how cloud and AI are reshaping enterprise IT — from someone who’s doing it, not just talking about it.