Rethinking the IT organization for the agentic AI era

With the advent of agentic AI, CIOs must be poised to adjust strategic IT priorities, mitigate new security risks, and reskill staff for a new era.

And while IT departments are always transforming to help drive how the greater organization pursues opportunities or addresses risks, certain technological moments represent pivotal points in which the IT organizational structure itself must be reevaluated.

[ Related: Agentic AI – News and insights ]

When self-provisioning cloud infrastructure capabilities and CI/CD deployment automation became mainstream, some CIOs questioned whether a separation of duties between development and operations functions still made sense, ushering in the DevOps era.

The rise of digital transformation as well has inspired many CIOs to rebrand IT as a digital delivery and data organization, with subsequent restructurings to fulfill the new business mandate.

The emergence of autonomous agentic AI could very well be another pivot point that spurs CIOs to rethink the foundations of IT.

But that’s still a matter of healthy debate, and either way, core IT is likely here to stay.  

“AI reminds me of the days when low-code, no-code, and RPA were going to make IT completely autonomous, but that didn’t happen,” says Niraj Tenany, CEO of Netwoven. “As long as organizations have systems to run their business, IT is needed to manage them and provide strategic direction.”

AI transforms IT’s mission and priorities

In my recent article, “Is AI the end of IT as we know it,” I discussed where generative AI capabilities spell a seismic shift for IT fundamentals. I asked how the CIO’s role evolves and how AI-powered tools and agents could spell the end of foundational IT functions. I conclude the article saying CIOs will also need to rethink their digital transformation strategies, and those who stagnate and manage IT to pre-AI expectations may be the ones to find AI is the end of IT, at least as they know it.

A major shift in CIO priorities is one reason to evaluate IT’s organizational structure. According to CIO.com’s 2025 State of the CIO Survey report, 75% of CIOs will spend more time on AI- and machine learning (ML)-related initiatives this year, ranking above cybersecurity (65%), product development (56%), and data analysis (56%).

And with CIOs under pressure to deliver business value from AI, there is also board pressure for job cuts and workplace efficiencies driven largely by AI expectations.

“As we enter the agentic AI era, IT teams are expanding their capabilities to embrace more dynamic, cross-functional collaboration — integrating human expertise with AI-driven agents,” says Gastón Milano, CTO of Globant Enterprise AI. “IT’s role is no longer just about governance, but about orchestrating new workflows where continuous learning, specialized talent, and human-AI partnership come together to define success.”

The net is that more CIOs will feel pressure to accelerate innovation while driving resiliency and efficiencies. For some CIOs who face downsizing, reorganizing IT, resetting team structures, and energizing the culture are cards forced upon them. Other CIOs may find that reorganizing IT can be a force multiplier in delivering agentic AI capabilities. 

Following are key questions CIOs should consider in contemplating a reorganization of IT in the wake of agentic AI’s rise.

How will human-machine collaboration work?

When considering AI’s role in any department, C-suite leaders should ask:

• What tasks and skills will be performed by AI agents?
• Which AI agents will act autonomously, and which will require humans-in-the-middle to perform oversight and other decision-making roles?
• What is the required governance around AI agents, and how will their effectiveness be measured?
• What responsibilities will remain with employees, but augmented by AI capabilities?
• What functions will be performed with partners in outsourcing or co-creation models?

The CIO’s objective should not only consider the machine-person collaboration in IT, but also guide other C-suite leaders on their departments’ transformations.

“IT is no longer a back-end function but a strategic nervous system, and organizations must shift from managing infrastructure to orchestrating intelligence, embedding AI agents in every business process,” says Vishal Sood, chief product officer at Typeface. “This shift demands new thinking about integrating with agent-to-agent systems, securing unpredictable workflows, and simplifying user interfaces. For IT leaders who embrace this transformation, the reward is speed, cohesion, and the ability to get ahead of the growing demands of app sprawl with intelligent, conversational interfaces.”

How should multidisciplinary agile teams evolve in the AI era?

The first wave of “multidisciplinary teams” focused on IT skills, aiming to ensure every agile team collaborated on delivering APIs, applications, and data services. When IT shifted from back- to front-office work in customer experiences, marketing automations, and other digital transformation initiatives, multidisciplinary agile teams often included business responsibilities and participation.

Now with AI agents, CIOs have a new impetus to consider how multidisciplinary teams deliver agentic AI capabilities, and also include AI agents as teammates. 

“Agile teams will need to master collaborative multitasking, ensuring seamless handoffs and feedback loops between people and machines,” says Anurag Dhingra, head of enterprise connectivity and collaboration at Cisco. “Product owners must define AI-appropriate stories, planning should account for which tasks are best handled by AI, and engineers will increasingly collaborate with AI for coding, testing, and deployments. Traditional metrics like velocity will no longer suffice, and new indicators will be needed to measure team performance in an AI-augmented environment.”

CIOs should review the impact of code generators in software development to facilitate a conversation about the makeup and expected efficiencies of agile development teams. An agile development team may need fewer coders, but more people to review code, new skills to validate AI agent quality, and an emerging role for using AI agents to develop automations.

How should IT governance and support functions be repositioned?

Reports suggest that IT and AI budgets are increasing, but CIOs should expect pressure to reduce spending in operations and governance functions. Automations will drive efficiencies, but CIOs will have to communicate the expanded responsibilities and scale driven by AI, data, and security functions.

One way to reposition IT is to demonstrate the business value of AI agents to improve operational KPIs. Naveen Zutshi, CIO of Databricks, says, “AI agents will be able to handle routine service management tasks, from troubleshooting to incident resolution, and can predict performance issues and execute fixes, reducing manual and administrative workload for IT professionals. This proactive and automated approach can minimize downtime and improve overall system reliability.”

A second opportunity is to invest in junior operations and security professionals and look to embed them more directly into business functions that are adopting agentic AI capabilities. The shift should help ensure that security, governance, and other compliance functions are considered at the forefront of the transformation and not an afterthought.  

“Rethinking IT structure for agentic AI requires fundamental changes to data governance and organizational flow because traditional security checkpoints must evolve into embedded governance that operates at machine speed,”  says George Gerchow, CSO of Bedrock Data. “Agile teams need unified data visibility where security, compliance, and business stakeholders share real-time insights instead of working in silos. The shift is organizational because cross-functional teams require shared authority over data decisions, with automated discovery and classification driving technology investments.”

How can IT lead change management and break departmental silos?

According to a recent Workday report on AI agents adoption, 82% of organizations are swiftly deploying AI agents to reduce workloads (88%) and drive faster innovation (82%). Over 75% of respondents believe that AI agents will positively impact employee experiences in areas of growth and development, work-life balance, and job satisfaction. However, employees state their boundaries, and only 45% are comfortable with AI agents assigning them tasks, and 30% being bossed by one.

CIOs should consider that there will be a spectrum of adoption, from those enthusiastic about AI to laggards and detractors. Furthermore, while some AI agents will work on department-specific workflows, bigger opportunities reside in using automation, analytics, and AI agents that connect departmental roles by aligning them to specific business objectives.

“Rather than just being implementers of technology, IT departments are becoming enablers and advisors, ensuring AI is deployed responsibly and empowering different business units to leverage AI to drive innovation,” says Andy Sen, CTO of AppDirect. “AI is humanizing IT, decentralizing capabilities that were once exclusive to technology departments, enabling other teams in HR, marketing, or finance to leverage complex technologies without needing deep technical expertise.”

Several areas for CIOs to develop capabilities include:

• Product managers and shifting to product-based IT for prioritizing the delivery of AI agents to fulfill strategic objectives and capitalize on customer opportunities
• Six Sigma process engineers, for capturing existing business processes and helping target where AI agents can drive efficiencies, scale operations, or improve quality
• Change leaders for guiding employees on adopting AI agents, evolving their responsibilities, and quelling fears around job loss

What new skills are needed in an agentic IT world?

When many employees think of gaining new skills, their first thought is often around certifications and courses. But CIOs should be thinking about the types of skills to help employees accelerate past individual contributor roles into team leadership, technology expert, and digital trailblazers.

Agentic AI will require IT professionals to shift their focus from executing tasks to guiding and overseeing autonomous systems, according to Brad Rumph, field CTO at Tines. “The key is moving from a doer to an orchestrator mindset, and IT professionals will need to develop a new mix of skills that blend technical expertise with critical thinking, ethics, and strong interpersonal communication,” he says.

In addition to non-technical soft skills, CIOs should consider emerging gen AI roles in IT that are skill-based extensions of existing roles. These include:

• AI data quality specialists who focus on unstructured data quality and evaluating AI training data for biases  
• AI diagnosticians will act as site reliability engineers, but applied to AI agents
• FinAI specialists who extend FinOps responsibilities into analyzing AI agent costs, benefits, and pricing

Should CIOs reorganize IT? The question may no longer be if, but when and how. CIOs embarking on a reorganization should specify the goals and ensure there are individualized communications to employees so they buy into the new direction and what’s in it for them.