Digital employees are here: What now?

Digital workforces are in every single place you go.

Before you’ve even entered your first meeting of the day, artificial intelligence can offer you a summary of your inbox, check your calendar and even submit an expense report in your behalf.

This isn’t a future vision; it’s today’s operating reality. AI agents are already embedded into every day lives – even in your workplace.

Are you ready?

Embracing adaptability

We’re seeing AI’s influence deep inside corporate boardrooms, hallways, distant offices and houses of consumers and businesses alike.

Countless articles have been written about concerns for workers being replaced by AI. Most offer a dystopian way forward for robots and chatbots replacing real humans in business roles, which fuels fears and strengthens the legend of AI, but is it accurate?

The recent EY Agentic AI within the Workplace Survey found 84% of employees are desirous to embrace agentic AI of their roles, yet greater than half (56%) worry about job security amongst AI agents. An alarming 51% fear agentic AI may make their jobs obsolete.

But uncertainty often breeds opportunities. The World Economic Forum has consistently emphasized that skills of the long run will hinge on creativity, problem-solving and emotional intelligence. How well you survive and thrive on this emerging environment may depend upon your adaptability and talent to show complexity into advantage with well-defined boundaries, governance structures, worker training and more.

The long run is our present

What was once the imaginative domain of “The Jetsons” or “Westworld” is becoming reality for a lot of business leaders and team members in 2026 and beyond.

“Rosie the Robot,” androids and “Uniblab” at the moment are considered co-workers through digital integration, and the workforce demands updated skills and experience in AI from seasoned and newly minted employees alike.

In line with a 2024 Citi GPS report, analysts expect 1.3 billion intelligent robots within the workforce by 2035 and 4 billion by 2050, blurring the road between digital and physical.

But what’s going to work seem like when digital employees, akin to AI-powered agents, and physical AI (robots) turn out to be lively participants in our workforce?

AI isn’t any longer a passive tool; it’s becoming an lively participant within the workplace. Are we ready for a piece environment infused with AI innovation where human creativity, empathy and trust are the one enduring differentiators?

Future skills and applied creativity

Organizations are implementing physical AI and agents able to strategic collaboration, executing complex decision-making and even leading facets of business workflows.

One thing is worthy of emphasis: The rise of digital employees doesn’t diminish the human role; it elevates it. The long run will reward those that can:

• Apply creativity: turning AI outputs into real-world value through design, storytelling and experimentation.
• Curate and orchestrate AI: managing agent teams, knowing when to trust their outputs, and when to override.
• Construct trust in systems: ensuring transparency, explainability and accountability across human-AI collaboration.
• Practice empathy and leadership: guiding humans through change, ensuring inclusion and shaping culture.

As these technologies proceed rapidly scaling, organizations that do greater than automate, cultivating environments where humans and digital employees can seamlessly work side-by-side, will set the pace of innovation.

While this inevitable shift is unlocking unprecedented gains in productivity and efficiency, it poses latest challenges in oversight, ethics and trust.

Organizations often struggle to maintain up with technological changes while remaining true to their core competencies. It helps to have someone, akin to a creative technologist, bridge the divide between business as usual and a more difficult, creative way forward for work.

The role of a creative technologist is critical. Professionals who straddle technology, business and the humanities will affirm that AI adoption is human-centric, ethical and generative of recent value.

Within the age of AI-powered digital automation, human creativity and trust are the one differentiators. Organizations that thrive on this latest era won’t simply automate – they are going to cultivate latest types of creativity, trust and collaboration amongst humans and digital employees alike.

Domhnaill Hernon is global lead for the EY Intelligent Realities Lab. He wrote this text for SiliconANGLE.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer