The rise of the agentic workforce: Redefining how India works
By Gautam Goenka, Senior Vice President, Head of Engineering & Site Head- India, UiPath
For much of the past decade, discussions around AI in the workplace have been dominated by a single question: Which jobs will automation replace? In India, where enterprises operate at a significantly large scale and across complex regulatory and operational environments, this question often comes with understandable anxiety. But it is also the wrong question. The shift now underway is not about replacing people with machines. It is about redesigning the workforce itself, where humans, AI agents, and automation work together as an integrated system.
This is the emergence of the agentic workforce.
From task execution to intelligent orchestration
Traditional workforce models are built around static roles and manual coordination. Work is assigned to people, automation is bolted on to improve efficiency, and AI is deployed in pockets to solve narrow problems. While this approach delivered incremental gains, it struggles in today’s environment where organisations must respond to real-time market changes, regulatory complexity, and rising customer expectations.
An agentic workforce takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of organising work purely around job titles, it distributes work dynamically. People provide leadership, judgement, and accountability, while AI agents analyse information, make decisions, and coordinate workflows, and bots execute repetitive, high-volume tasks.
In this model, work flows to the most capable resource at any given moment. The result is a workforce that is more responsive, resilient, and scalable, qualities that are especially critical for large enterprises operating at India’s scale.
Humans move from execution to leadership
As AI agents become more capable and reliable, the role of people is evolving. Employees are no longer required to stay embedded in each process. Instead, they are moving into oversight, exception handling, and strategic control, shifting from being in the loop to being on the loop and supervising outcomes rather than executing every step.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report, 86% of employers expect AI and information processing technologies to transform their business by 2030. In India, this trend is already visible across manufacturing, retail & wholesale, and healthcare & life sciences industries, where scale and speed make traditional workforce models increasingly difficult to sustain.
This transition matters. It elevates human work rather than diminishing it. At the same time, organisations that do not rethink how work is managed risk falling behind. Without new workforce models, productivity plateaus, talent engagement suffers, and businesses struggle to compete for skills in an increasingly AI-driven market.
AI agents as part of the workforce
A defining characteristic of the agentic workforce is that AI agents are no longer treated as tools, but as workforce participants. This means they are aligned to specific business roles and outcomes. They’re also governed for security, compliance, and responsible use. And they are monitored and measured for performance, just like human teams.
For Indian enterprises operating across geographies and regulatory environments, this level of governance is essential. When AI agents are managed with the same rigour as people, organisations gain the confidence to scale automation beyond isolated use cases and embed it into core operations.
The payoff is significant. As AI agents take on increasingly complex workflows, human talent can be redeployed to higher-value work, improving workforce utilisation, enabling smarter staffing models, and supporting sustainable growth.
Skills, scale, and the Indian opportunity
By 2030, 70% of the skills required for most jobs will fundamentally change as a result of AI. Professionals will be required to work alongside AI, supervise intelligent systems, and focus on outcomes rather than tasks. India is uniquely positioned here. With its strong tech talent base and experience in large-scale operations, the country can lead in designing workforce models that blend human ingenuity with AI-driven execution. But this will require intentional investment in reskilling, change management, and leadership readiness across the enterprise.
The agentic workforce represents a more balanced, more human vision of AI adoption, one where technology absorbs complexity, and people focus on leadership, creativity, and impact. For Indian organisations navigating rapid growth, regulatory complexity, and constant change, this model is no longer a future concept. It is quickly becoming a practical necessity.