Another Limitless Pivot is upon us - the chaos and benefits of "Agentic"

The next Limitless Pivot is coming, soon, chaos will most likely ensue, but are we ready (hint, not likely).

We are currently obsessed with the word "agent." I've been running AI Agent training across my org and always start with a simple premise: "We will likely stop talking about Agents entirely within 6 - 12 months - we will have moved on to their children."

The word Agent implies a persona - a digital being with a mind of its own - agency. But the real signal in this technological shift isn't the emergence of artificial life. It is the sudden, friction-less abundance of human intent - limitless human agency.

Moving from Agent to Delegate

We should stop talking about agents and start talking about delegates - the deliberate act of delegating human agency. This pivot in framing isn't mine; credit goes to the philosopher Nicholas Lmblad. What follows, however, is my extension of that idea.

When we rename these flows as "Delegates" and "Delegation Flows," the focus shifts immediately to the human providing the authority, the agency. It exposes the commercial and operational reality: we are no longer constrained by the physical limits of human time or the friction of administrative effort. We have moved from a world of scarce agency to one of limitless execution - and we have been here before.

The Lessons of Limitless Pivots

History shows us that whenever a physical or commercial limit is removed, the resulting chaos forces the creation of new operational disciplines.

Consider the music industry. A key limit was the CD - and the massive supply chain needed to get it into your hands. MP3 format, CD ripping shareware, and Napster removed that limit overnight, creating absolute chaos, market and creator/supply chain disruption, and limitless, uncontrolled supply. The eventual equilibrium - legislation, Apple Music, Spotify - didn't just deliver the music; it delivered the governance, equitability for artists, and the new operating model required for a world without supply scarcity.

Even further back, connectivity followed the same pattern. When network availability moved from "best endeavours" to always-on, limitless connectivity. The resulting business expectations/shifts, and the commercial impacts on those expectations of any real downtime, necessitated the Network Operations Centre (NOC). And when this always-on world made cyber-attack vectors effectively limitless, we saw the birth of the Security Operations Centre (SOC). Both provided assurance and capability for value growth and sustainability. This innovation and growth is still being experienced and built on today.

The Erosion of the Limit

We are at that same limitless pivot point with AI. As Hannah Fry highlights in her recent exploration of "OpenClaw", the barrier to entry for autonomous execution of our agency has vanished. A single developer can now unleash a "delegate" that can send thousands of emails, manage bank accounts, manufacture and ship products, and persist in a task long after a human would have tired.

The impact of limitless agency is larger than just our organisation - it impacts entire ecosystems. Most of our current industries are not just managed by limits - they are fundamentally predicated on them. Whether it is the physical capacity of a 40-hour work week or the cognitive limit of how many emails a person can reasonably process, these constraints act as the invisible scaffolding of our economy - again affecting supply.

By removing these "friction points," we aren't just making things faster; we are fundamentally disrupting sectors - from administrative intermediation to professional services and fulfilment - that rely on the fact that certain tasks are limited, difficult, or slow.

If a business assumes it is competing against a human-limited rival but is actually facing a limitless delegation flow, the competitive landscape is permanently altered. Equally, if thousands of personal delegated agents can each send through thousands of requests, 24x7, our limited workflows may not be able to cope with the demand and collapse. We are no longer just automating tasks; we are automating/delegating the "will" to execute them. Without a new layer of governance, the very commercial limits that define our markets will be eroded until only chaos remains.

This is not a doomsayer's prediction (I know of made it sound like it though). It is an emerging commercial reality. It will be a reality sooner than we will like.

The resulting chaos will drive the need for the creation of new operational disciplines. However, in the chaos is real value.

The Great Unlock: From Effort to Outcome

The flip side of this disruption is an unprecedented expansion of capability. When we move past the noise of the risk, we find a world where the friction that has historically stifled some innovation simply evaporates. Abundant agency means we can finally tackle the "long tail" of problems that were previously too tedious or expensive to justify human attention - at the personal and macro scales.

Harvard Business School Professor Tsedal Neeley and Expedia Group's Ritcha Gupta Ranjan argue that we are moving beyond simple AI assistance into a "higher order" of execution. They suggest that this shift toward agentic delegation is what will finally "unlock a 10x improvement in productivity."

We are transitioning from managing effort to directing outcomes. The ceiling of our ambition used to be our stamina; now, it is simply our imagination. If we can master the delegation, we don't just work faster - we work safely at a higher level of complexity than ever before.

But what is the framework, the NOC, of this current pivot?

The OC for Agency

If agency is now abundant, we must build the infrastructure and frameworks to unlock this safely - people, processes, and technology. We are already seeing the hyper-scalers creating platform capabilities, to support enterprise ICT - Microsoft's Agent365 is a clear example - but this is just a tool. We need the frameworks that will utilise these tools.

So, once again, history repeats. Just as we have the NOC and the SOC frameworks ensuring the unlock of value from these limitless pivots, we now need a framework for agency - the Agent Operations Centre.

This AOC concept, pioneered by Jaime Enriquez and Fusion5 , is a framework for managing velocity. Like the NOC and SOC before it, the AOC doesn't "do" the work for the business. It provides the context and people-based and process-based controls that allow the business to move faster, safely, at their own speed.

The New Role of ICT

The business has made the turn. They are tech-savvy, ready to execute, and - frankly - they're not asking for permission anymore. They are wanting diffused decisions, capability, and innovation - at the speed of work. The question is whether ICT can make this turn too?

To remain relevant, ICT's role is now sharper. There is a need to remain accountable, but now a growing role as the architects of the accountability guardrails, the distributors of safety and trust, and the auditors of the diffused estate. Empower the rest of the business to safely self-serve.

McKinsey & Company 's framing of the "Agentic Organisation" - where humans sit above the loop rather than in it - is where this lands. In that world, the IT function becomes a governance engine enabling safe, rapid, diffused, People-led value and innovation.

Trust drives value

The business is already delegating to agents. The only question is whether we're delegating safely, traceably, and on purpose.

If ICT wants to stay relevant, the work isn't hoarding permissions - it's designing the guardrails and capabilities (people process and technology capabilities) that make distributed execution viable and visible: clear authority, non-human identity and RBAC management, and continuous audit. That's foundational to what an AOC must provide.

Because soon, the scarcest resource won't be effort, it will be trust and confidence. And the organisations that can manufacture confidence - consistently and systematically - will realise the great unlock and outcompete the ones that can only manufacture output.

Photo by Roger Bradshaw on Unsplash