The Most Important Hire of 2026
Why every serious company needs a Chief Agent Officer and why most will get it wrong.
Jensen Huang said it plainly: "Every company needs an agentic system strategy. This is the new computer". He was not speaking to developers. He was speaking to the market. And the implication is far larger than most executive teams are prepared to admit.
We have crossed a line that many organisations still treat as theoretical. AI is no longer confined to drafting, summarising, or assisting at the margins. It is increasingly able to interact with systems, execute tasks, follow workflows, call tools, and operate across the digital surface area of the business. That changes the role of AI completely. It is no longer just a layer on top of work. In more and more cases, it is becoming part of how the work gets done.
That is why this moment is not about optimisation alone. It is about organisational redesign.
The real question is no longer whether agents are useful. The real question is whether your organisation has anyone whose job it is to rebuild the business around what agents can now do.
