The C-suite is ready for agentic AI.

A study published on Thursday by the International Data Corporation, in partnership with Salesforce, found that CEOs are overwhelmingly bullish on implementing “digital labor” into their workforces, with 99% of more than 150 surveyed saying they’re prepared for the transformation.

These CEOs, who were all from organizations ranging from 100 to 10,000 employees, see agents as a key part of this vision:

• 65% said they are looking at AI agents as a means of transforming their business models entirely, and 73% said that digital labor would transform their company’s structure.
• 72% of respondents believe that most employees will have an AI agent reporting to them in the next five years, and 57% of CEOs reported that digital labor would increase the need for workers in leadership roles.
• Some of the departments that CEOs expect to see the most impact include security, software development and customer service.

Given the nascent nature of this technology, the fact that so many CEOs are sold on agentic AI is “striking,” said Alan Webber, research director at IDC. “They're looking at AI agents to reshape their business, to redo what it is they do, reform workflows and business processes.”

With this massive transformation, 80% of CEOs report that the future of work involves humans and agents coexisting, rather than complete displacement of jobs, with a projected 4 in 5 employees either remaining in their current roles or redeployed to new ones, according to the report.

While that theoretical figure still leaves 20% of workers out of luck, Webber noted that there are many roles where the impact of shifting to an “agentic enterprise” is still unknown. For example, Webber said, with the rise of AI-powered coding agents handling development, “we don't know exactly what that augmentation and what the human role there looks like yet.”