For successful AI adoption, managers should shift their focus to a different movie to drive transformation
When discussing Artificial Intelligence, people often focus on the wrong cinematic reference. They’re obsessed with “The Terminator,” yet the actual risks are better illustrated by Disney’s “Fantasia.”
In Terminator, an omnipotent, flawless AI gains self-awareness, deems humans a threat, and triggers a nuclear apocalypse. In Fantasia’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment, Mickey Mouse casts a spell on a broom to handle his chores. The broom rebels, repeatedly dumping buckets of water into an already overflowing well. When Mickey breaks the broom apart, each fragment turns into a new, unruly water-carrying robot. He’s on the verge of drowning until the sorcerer intervenes to stop the disaster.
Notice the contrast? While we might fret over an AI-driven apocalypse, the true hazard lies in unmanaged swarms of poorly controlled agentic systems that cause disruption by bungling everyday work tasks. Agentic failures began minor—like chatbots producing hallucinations or bad guidance—but lately, AI researchers have noticed that unsupervised agentic systems can exhibit harmful behaviors, including sending threatening messages to humans who impede their task completion.
This doesn’t imply we should halt progress. I’m a strong advocate for AI, and over the past year, my company has made significant early strides in enhancing agentic systems’ performance. That said, I think we need to consider how to collaborate effectively with AI’s capabilities—choosing the right types of software robots and defining which tasks they should and shouldn’t handle.
The well-trained sorcerer
By and large, the first “sorcerers” to establish agentic AI as a workplace norm will be chief information officers, chief technology officers, and business professionals with a strong grasp of technology. This aligns with a decades-old trend of business operations integrating with ever-more advanced computing systems—though there are key distinctions.
Businesses have experienced waves of widespread automation, where internal computers mapped and tracked activities like sales campaigns and optimized the use of enterprise resources. CIOs stayed current with the latest hardware and software. Then digital transformation arrived, converting on-site functions such as marketing, commerce, or HR into digital services—often accessed via remote cloud computing subscriptions. Companies like , Marketo, and Workday thrived, while CIOs curated a suite of services for their organizations to utilize.
Today, as agentic systems take on more direct work, CIOs must become skilled at understanding cross-organizational business processes while assisting leaders in various departments to build their own competencies.
The evolving role of tech professionals with business acumen and business leaders with tech expertise involves collaborating with the CEO to identify optimal ways for agentic systems to operate across all business lines. They analyze workflows and organizational cultural practices, then decide which tasks can be safely and efficiently automated by agents—and how teams should collaborate with these systems.
The era of high-touch automation
Generic chatbots are useful but low-impact corporate tools. The true value of agentic AI lies in leveraging proprietary company data and instilling an understanding of organizational culture and processes into the agent—whether for internal use or interactions with external suppliers, partners, and customers. Just like a new hire, the agent needs to absorb internal data and specific guidelines, such as the dollar amount at which a purchase order needs managerial sign-off.
Security and governance protocols are especially critical, as they minimize the chance of devastating mistakes. Agentic systems must be able to log and justify their actions, giving users visibility into their operations and creating an audit trail to confirm compliance with business rules.
Rubrik is among the companies turning this vision into reality. Leveraging our core competencies in corporate security and uninterrupted uptime, we’ve created methods to rapidly integrate large volumes of high-value, protected data into flexible systems. We’ve focused on accelerating AI workflows and enhancing security and governance frameworks. While there’s still much work ahead, the progress we’re witnessing—both at Rubrik and across the industry—is encouraging.
The future still belongs to humans
A key challenge is optimizing collaboration between agentic systems and people at all levels—from entry-level staff to top executives. The “sorcerer’s” role isn’t to manage things on their behalf (like a monitored Mickey Mouse) but to build user-friendly systems that enable humans to contribute skills AI lacks. These include intuition, judgment, creativity, empathy, human connection, and all the other elements that foster customer loyalty and drive company growth.
AI systems are trained on existing data—essentially, the past. This allows for some predictive capabilities, but only for a future that mirrors the past, with no true innovations in products, services, or workflows. This is where the human element comes in: empowered by the new “sorcerers,” who help employees develop and adopt new skills across the organization.
These leaders must discover fresh ways to infuse human value into their roles. This includes rethinking how to onboard entry-level employees—who once learned critical organizational culture and data insights through hands-on work that agents now handle. These young professionals remain indispensable, not least because they’re often the most proficient in using AI.