Gartner to CX Leaders: Stop Treating AI Agents Like Employees Before It Costs You

Gartner VP Analyst Kathy Ross on why AI agents belong in your tech stack, not on your org chart – and what happens when leaders get this wrong. In this CX Today interview, Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Kathy Ross, VP Analyst at Gartner, to unpack a provocative Gartner stance: that customer service leaders are fundamentally mismanaging AI agents by treating them like human talent. With 39% of CEOs already viewing AI agents as employees, the stakes for getting this right – or wrong – have never been higher. AI agents are powerful. But power without the right management model is a liability, and Gartner's Kathy Ross isn't pulling punches about where most organizations are going wrong. The scale problem is real: A human agent might affect 30-45 customers if something goes wrong. An AI agent? Hundreds of thousands, in minutes. That changes everything about how failures need to be managed. The org chart is the wrong place for AI: Placing AI agent oversight under people managers stretches them too thin and puts fundamentally different skill sets in conflict. Operations and technology leaders need to own this. Accountability has to be deliberate: Ross outlines a clear split: ops leaders own requirements, monitoring, and escalation; tech leaders own observability, integration, and compliance. People managers only get looped in when AI failure directly impacts the human workforce. This isn't about replacing humans, it's about redirecting them: The real opportunity is using AI to create space for human agents to do what only humans can: build relationships, drive loyalty, and uncover growth.