On Culture: Human Agency, as critical to our companies as to our democracy
This summer, sitting in airport lounges, on flights, at dinners with CEOs and CHROs, it feels like the reindustrialization of the United States. Everyone is rebuilding something — supply chains, org charts, entire theories of how work gets done. And in nearly every one of those conversations, the same idea keeps surfacing, usually without anyone quite defining it: agency.
We say we want empowered employees but how much of our strategic planning ensures a humans first culture and workplace?
Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index makes a claim worth sitting with: as AI and autonomous agents absorb more of the actual execution of work, human agency expands . . . "what they can do and who gets to do it. . . as agents take on more of the execution, humans increasingly have more agency—more room to direct the work, make the calls, and own the outcomes."
In 2024, Culturati's AI Taskforce developed the Culturati AI Spectrum, our way of categorizing the impact of AI on human workers: Automation, Augmentation and Agency. Agency, the use of AI to empower workers, to imagine new models & projects continues to stand out as a key desired outcome.
Reid Hoffman and co-author Greg Beato built their book's (Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future) whole argument around a coined term: "superagency" — the idea that when a technology gives an individual new capabilities, and millions of people gain those capabilities at once, the effect compounds into something larger than personal empowerment. It becomes a societal shift.
So what are our opportunities with millions of employees being given new opportunities, developing new capabilities . . . can we program our societal shift?
There's a civic parallel here, and it's not a stretch. Former Austin Mayor Steve Adler, in his new memoir Hot Seat — Hot City, repeatedly describes agency as essential to a robust, inclusive and flourishing society.
Citizen agency is fundamental to democracy, to our resistance against authoritarian decay. Without active participation and citizen agency, citizens risk turning into passive subjects. We are witnessing this decay and America's descent in global standing.
Swap "government" for "company" and the concept is the same. We'd lose our most essential sources of creativity and judgment if we didn't maintain workers' agency; we'd lose our differentiators and competitive edge.
Yours in curiosity & discovery,
Eugene Sepulveda
Founder & CEO, Culturati
At a moment when AI conversations tend toward either blind optimism or doom, Brett Hurt offers a third path in his new book, Love Conquers Fear: that the real frontier isn't artificial intelligence, but human consciousness and choice. Join Hurt and Rev. Steven Tomlinson, PhD for a timely conversation on fear, technology, and what it takes to build a future rooted in abundance rather than scarcity.
Agents, human agency, and the opportunity for every organization
Microsoft WorkLab Summary: Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index frames its core claim as a "new agency equation": as AI and agents absorb more execution, human agency expands — more room to direct the work, make the calls, own the outcomes. The data backs it up so far: 66% of AI users say AI has freed them for higher-value work, and 58% say they're producing work they couldn't have a year ago. But the report argues agency isn't self-executing — most organizations aren't yet built to capture it. That's the Transformation Paradox: 65% of workers fear falling behind without AI, yet 45% still find it safer to stick with the old way, and only 13% feel rewarded for reinventing how they work. Just 19% of AI users sit in the "Frontier" zone where individual readiness and organizational support reinforce each other; 10% are "blocked" — skilled, but with nowhere to spend that agency. The closing thread: the goal isn't just amplifying output, but keeping human judgment at the center — so people retain the agency to decide what comes next, not just execute faster inside someone else's design. |
Your AI agent can be a teammate. But it still needs a boss
Fortune By Keith Ferrazzi and Wendy Smith Summary: Companies have spent two years teaching employees to use AI — the wrong skill, the authors argue, now that agents pursue goals and trigger actions on their own rather than waiting for instructions. The real gap: nobody is teaching people how to lead agents. The risk isn't that agents will be obviously bad; it's that they'll be fluent enough that people relax their judgment right when they need to sharpen it. The framework: people relate to agents through five mental models — tool, intern, service provider, teammate, expert — each carrying different assumptions about autonomy and trust. The same agent may shift between all five depending on the task, so the real skill isn't prompting, it's "human-agent fluency": knowing which relationship a given task actually requires. The close: calling an agent a "teammate" doesn't say how much authority to grant it. Human accountability for the outcome stays constant across every model. |
Democracy is a verb – Democratic citizenship in action
George W. Bush Presidential Center Summary: Agency is the hinge of this piece. Its closing call to action is direct: each citizen must embrace their responsibilities by using their agency to act on democratic principles — and hold leaders to that same standard. The verb in "democracy is a verb" is agency — the argument is that democracy doesn't fail from a lack of belief in its principles, but from citizens failing to exercise the agency required to act on them. That framing sets up the rest of the piece: a healthy liberal democracy isn't a static condition but a practice, sustained only by active participation. The piece notes that just 20% of the world's population currently lives in a free country per Freedom House, framing American democracy as an exception that requires continual exercise of that agency rather than something that simply persists on its own. It pairs freedoms with responsibilities — voting, jury service, civil engagement across disagreement — and argues these only become real, agency-driven participation through meaningful civic education. |
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