How AI Agents Will Reshape the Future of Work in 2026

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By Moha Shah, Venture Capital Leader & Innovation Operator | AI, Mobility, Climate, & Fintech/Insurtech | Fortune 100 to Startups

The Boston Consulting Group forecasts that the market size for AI agents will reach $52.1 billion by 2030. This signals that AI agents will transform the future of work by autonomously completing workflows with orchestration across business functions and teams. While AI tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini 3 Pro have dominated workplace adoption over the past two years, AI agents will enable organizations to operate with greater agility in 2026 by augmenting human decision-making and reducing manual workflows.

What Are AI Agents?

According to Google Cloud, AI agents can “pursue goals and complete tasks on behalf of users. They show reasoning, planning, and memory and have a level of autonomy to make decisions, learn, and adapt.” Popular AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude require humans to prompt them to generate an output, but AI agents operate differently. They can complete a single task or multi-step workflows autonomously without human direction. For example, a customer service AI agent can answer a call, verify the caller’s identity, identify a billing error, process a refund, update the billing system, and transcribe a summary, all without human intervention. 

How AI Agents Will Transform Work

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How exactly will AI agents reshape work? Today, AI agents are completing workflows autonomously from transcribing meeting notes to analyzing and compiling unstructured data for executive presentations. A popular notetaking application, Otter AI, uses AI agents to transcribe notes and automatically send summaries to meeting participants. Visa is working to enable AI agents to shop and pay for purchases on their cardholders’ behalf. These examples illustrate AI agents’ expanding role across different industries. This post examines this transformation through insights from VCs, enterprise leaders, startup founders, and my experience working in financial services and with technology startups.

What Do Venture Capitalists Think About AI Agents?

Through my experience working at a Silicon Valley-based corporate venture capital firm, I have heard pitches from numerous startup founders who are solving unique problems using emerging technologies. In the current Gen AI era, leading VCs believe that AI agents will transform work across different industries by automating workflows, creating hybrid human-AI partnerships, and forcing legacy industries to modernize their IT infrastructure. Below are insights from top VCs. 

• Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) | This Silicon Valley-based firm invests in early-stage software startups across different verticals, including AI, consumer, and healthcare. During a December 2025 podcast, a16z Partner Angela Strange predicts that legacy industries like banking and insurance will “fix their plumbing” or outdated IT infrastructure to capture value from AI, improve the customer experience, and prevent revenue loss from siloed data management.

• Glasswing Ventures | This Boston-based VC firm invests in early-stage startups across AI and frontier technologies. The firm recently published its Five-Stage Agent Autonomy Framework, which distills the AI agent revolution across three dimensions – impact, capability, and cognition.

• Madrona | This Seattle-based VC firm invests in startups across the AI tech stack. During the firm’s 2025 IA Summit, panelists addressed AI agents’ impact on work. Madrona’s blog post stated that AI agents won’t replace humans; instead, hybrid human-AI teams will emerge to enable “organizational intelligence work that was previously impossible at scale.”

Across these perspectives, AI agents will enable transformation – they will drive better customer experiences, foster hybrid collaboration with humans, and prevent revenue loss. However, success depends on enterprises investing in modern IT and data infrastructure. Angela Strange’s perspective on fixing IT systems in legacy industries resonates with my experience working at large insurance companies. Outdated IT infrastructure and disparate data sources hamper innovation – from new product development to integrations with AI-first startups. 

How Are Enterprises Adopting AI Agents?

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Enterprises are moving from popular AI tools like ChatGPT to AI agents that streamline workflows. According to Moveworks’ 2025 survey of 200 U.S. IT executives at companies generating $1B+ in annual revenue, 91% reported that non-technical employees were driving AI initiatives. Technical leaders are equally bullish on AI agent adoption. In a 2025 survey of 500 technical leaders conducted by Anthropic and research firm Material, 81% plan to use AI agents to tackle more complex use cases in 2026. These findings signal a workplace transformation where AI agents will work alongside humans.

Momentum around AI agent adoption is rising at leading companies. During GAI World, a Gen AI conference held during Boston AI Week in September 2025, executives from Bain to Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan shared how they’re building and deploying AI agents to automate workflows across their organizations. During panels and keynotes – including insights from MIT Professor and MIT Media Lab Director Ramesh Raskar – executives and startup founders indicated that the adoption of AI agents will accelerate in 2026 and beyond. See my recap here: “Top Takeaways from Boston AI Week 2025.”

How Do Startup Founders Think AI Agents Will Transform Work?

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Startup founders are at the front lines of building innovative products and services, making their perspectives valuable for understanding how emerging technologies are being adopted. I recently connected with several founders working on agentic AI to learn how they believe AI agents will reshape the future of work. Here’s what they shared: 

• Adrienne Murga, Co-Founder of eLLMo AI, reflected, “Org charts get thinner, capability layers get thicker: You will see fewer layers of coordinators and more centralized platforms that distribute agent capacity across the company. The differentiator will be how fast an org can deploy, govern, and improve workflows.”

• Georgia Liu, Founder of Causena, said, “AI agents will reshape the future of work by making causal reasoning—once slow, expensive, and inaccessible—available at scale. As governments and institutions face rising complexity, the real value of AI will be in revealing why outcomes happen, not just summarizing what people say. This shift enables better policy, safer systems, and more accountable decisions.”  

• Nidhi Bali, Co-Founder of Nalos, stated, “The rise of agentic AI will continue to commoditize intelligence and execution, shifting differentiation to taste, judgment, and the ability to choose the right problems to solve. The future of work belongs to polymaths who bridge domains to build products and systems that meaningfully impact humanity. As builders of this technology, our responsibility is to keep it human-centered, designed to augment people, not replace them.”

• Thomas Arul, Founder of CloserLook AI, noted, “AI agents are set to transform the workplace by evolving from passive assistants into autonomous ‘digital teammates’ capable of executing complex, end-to-end business processes independently. This shift will redefine human roles toward ‘orchestration,’ where employees focus on strategic oversight, creative direction, and managing ecosystems of specialized agents rather than performing routine execution.”

These founders envision a future where AI agents won’t simply displace human workers. Instead, they will handle execution and allow people to focus on judgment, creativity, strategy, and human-centered design. This shift will enable organizations to become more agile, with flatter hierarchies and faster decision-making.

Key Takeaways  

• AI agents will shift human work from execution to orchestration in 2026. Acting as “digital teammates,” AI agents will execute multi-step workflows, while people will focus on judgment, creativity, and problem selection.   

• Adoption is accelerating across enterprises. Moveworks’ survey shows that 91% of IT executives say non-technical employees are driving AI initiatives, while Anthropic's joint survey with Material revealed that 81% of technical leaders plan to deploy AI agents for complex use cases in 2026.

• Enterprises must upgrade legacy IT infrastructure and data systems to successfully adopt AI agents and remain competitive.

• AI agents will augment workers rather than displace them. Startup founders building AI-first ventures emphasize that agents will manage execution, while people focus on higher-order work.

• Enterprises will become leaner and more agile as they adopt AI agents. Flatter organizations will enable quicker decision-making and more effective governance of AI-powered workflows.  

 Additional Resources to Learn About AI Agents

Below are resources that showcase additional insights, trends, and research on AI agents.

 Introductory Overview

• IBM | “What Are AI Agents?” – A basic primer on AI agents – how they are defined, how they work, and use cases.

 State of the Industry

• LangChain | “State of AI Agents” – Analysis from LangChain, a well-regarded open-source framework for developing apps with LLMs, covers insights on the current state of agentic AI and its use cases.

Academic Innovation & Research

• MIT | Project NANDA – Launched in 2025 by MIT Professor and MIT Media Lab Director Ramesh Raskar, Project NANDA aims to build a more open, decentralized infrastructure for AI agents.

WOMEN x AI Community Insights

• WOMEN x AI | “Top 10 Takeaways from ‘Beyond the Hype: Agentic AI’ With WOMEN x AI” – Insights from startup founders and product leaders working with AI agents during a virtual panel in August 2025.

• WOMEN x AI | “The Future of Work in the New Era of AI” – Perspectives from Boston-based startup founders building AI-first ventures and my own insights.