Executive Leverage in 2025: Building Zero-FTE Capability

Welcome to Applied AI Australia. I'm Raand Rodriguez and here's the truth. Ignoring AI is probably the fastest way to fall behind. This show cuts through the noise and delivers only on what matters, growth, margins, and time. Each week, I translate AI into practical outcomes leaders can actually use. Now, every exec I know, every leader I know wants more leverage. You want more leverage. But what if I said to you you could get the most leverage you've had in your career, but you had to get rid of half of your team and replace them with AI agents. Would you do it? I mean, it's not a decision most of us are going to have to make straight away, but it's something that we're going to have to make at some point because artificial intelligence and AI agents is going to be the biggest leverage we can get. I was recently reading a McKenzie report and I saw something that stood out to me. Honestly, it hit me like a pack of bricks. I saw this thing zero FT departments. So full-time employee but no staff in it. So that's the reality. It's happening around the world. Companies are starting to hire digital agents and counting them as actual headcount on their org chart. So, real departments with profit and loss, but no humans, all AI agents. I know this sounds odd like it's from another galaxy, but it's not. Now, McKenzie has even got a task and role for these agents, ATentic task equivalents. So, as I read that, I'm sitting here thinking about an org chart. You got your CEO and you got your three to four execs underneath and then generally they would have their leaders reporting into them. But the reality is they're not going to be all humans. They're going to be a mix of agents. So just think about the org structure and think about how that flows down and the impact and the riffle that makes to the organization's running and structure. But the reality is where they are today on complex workflows, the best they are on a good day is interns. Now they need to be watched pretty closely, but they're still interns. Now, I know none of you are going to say no to an extra pair of hands, handling the grunt work, but the thing about interns is they may start in the mail room, but the better they get, especially the ones that turn up to work every day, turn up on time, take in everything they learn, they get pretty good pretty quick. Now, that's the same with agents. OpenAI recently announced their CEO Sam said it's not going to be far from when agents are able to work for weeks and months at a time non-stop. Now, if you compare that to your average employee who you pay for 7 and a half hours a day and they're probably the reality is they're probably working 3 to four hours of concentrated work. Compare that to a Gentic AI when it reaches its peak. It's going to cause a lot of question marks and disruption. Now, that's what I want to talk to you about in today's episode. It's not about the rise of the machines, but what we do need to talk about is how are you going to need to shift as an executive and a leader when you're not just managing people, but people and agentic agents. Now, I don't know if I'm ready for that kind of operational shift, but the reality is it's happening anyway, so I might as well get on with it. Now, I don't think it's going to take an executive or a CEO role right now. I mean, who knows where this train's bloody going, but the medium to entry level roles 100% are at risk. And if I give you an example about that, I've delivered all the way from $150,000 of revenue to $1.1 million in new client revenue through using Aentic AI agents. To put the numbers to it, around 90% of Australian firms have tested with the Gentic AI systems as of 2025. And the ones that are actually using it effectively and delegating to agents are saying it's their competitive advantage. Now, as I said, personally, uh I don't think it comes anywhere close to replacing a full-time person that's been in organization for a while, but interns, hell yeah. 100%. As a leader managing people, you need to start thinking about managing AI agents as being a designer of cognition. Now, there's three conversations at senior levels I'm seeing and hearing are surfacing everywhere. How do you shape capability? Cuz if you think about when you shape capability within a person compared to when you're going to be shaping it with artificial intelligence, it looks very different. Well, the things that you should be looking at is business strategy. For a number one, you need to really be spending time on focusing what success looks like for this employee, digital employee, your agent, and what are the outcomes that you're going to measure for a start. Okay? So, that's going to be pretty similar to humans. But where it starts to change pretty quickly is when you think about designing it and setting up its workflow. Now, you don't have to do this, right? You'll have people on doing this for you, I'm sure. But you still need oversight and understanding this because we are talking about measuring employees capability and capability design which is a leadership role. Recently the CEO of Australia host Paul Graeme said the flow of data is now the lifeblood of meaningful customer experience. Building agentic AI on shaky data is it's like putting a skyscraper on sand. it's going to fall. Don't even think about scaling agents. Now, if something goes off the tracks and breaks the law, if it goes against ASICH, when you get audited, you're not going to be able to say, "Look, the code was wrong, Claude did it, and you get off the hook." It doesn't work like that. Just like it wouldn't happen that way. If one of your people did something wrong, you would still be accountable to it. The golden rule is for every AI generated outcome, whether it's a transaction, a report, customer communication, the million-dollar question is, can you trace it back to the model, the data, and the prompt that was put in to generate that result? That becomes the new audit trail. Okay, so that's how you have board level governance and solve the accountability paradox with Aentic AI. Because what you need to remember is as soon as an agent touches any real part of your business, whether it's pricing, product, or financial operations, there's risk that comes with that. And the other thing you need to think about is it's not just about having zero FTE departments. Human oversight is critical. Now, the reality is for over a century, leadership has not changed too much. We've essentially been managing people and been managing effort, but we're now managing, it's weird to even say it, cognition. But the ethics and guardrails that go in place do not change. They level up. The only thing that's changing is how we're getting there, the medium. Now the third thing you need to be thinking about is when the grunt work does get taken over you will get extra head space and cognitive bandwidth. So where is your leadership energy of yourself in your teams going to go when the agent takes over the day-to-day grind? Because it's not just about increasing efficiency by using these agents. Bane recently discovered and shared that when they're rolled out effectively, the top skill for leaders who've rolled out a effectively is imagination. So the question to ask yourself is if you could shift your focus even just for next quarter to unlock new value for the organization with the mindset of not just managing people but being an orchestrator of intelligence managing agents where would you start to put your efforts? Now, if we look at what the data tells us in terms of Australian organizations, a great example of one of the leaders locally is Telra. Now, Telra cut down call time by 90%. And reduced follow-ups by 20%. After delegating summaries from AI agents to staff who then verified it, Woolwarts is another great example. They were able to significantly reduce their overstock within their business and lift customer loyalty by implementing supply chain agents. Now the reality is organizations getting this right in 2025. The data shows there somewhere between 10 to 25% better ebida outcomes. And the secondary metric that's going up pretty quickly is share of wallet market share. So, how do you implement this? Okay, well, let's break it into four steps that you can implement in 48 hours. It doesn't matter if you've got a AI agents or you don't. Just needs to be tweaked. Pick one task your agent is doing currently or task or workflow your team are doing that currently takes up a significant amount of time and energy. Could an AI agent be rolled out to help? If you've already got one, what is it currently doing? Where's it going wrong? Where could it go wrong? And the same logic applies for step three. Look at those risks. What checkpoints, oversight, or human review is needed to ensure it's airtight? And if [ __ ] hits the fan, excuse the French, who is accountable for that outcome? Because the reality is we are going to be equally as accountable if stuff goes wrong. Just as we're going to reap the benefits when things go well and we start moving towards that 25% increase in IBIDA. Now the reality is movers using and leveraging this technology are going to be setting the benchmarks. The numbers are there. Now, the later that you decide to get on board and implement and scale correctly, the harder it's going to be to catch up. So, if agents are driving the system, how firm is your hand as a leader on the steering wheel? Agents are your new executive leverage. You need to learn to design cognition because at some point, you're going to need to know to lead minds and machines. And that's going to define the next era of business leaders in Australia. Now remember, you can't control the speed of change, but you can control how quick you adapt. Thank you. My name's Roman Rodriguez. This is Applied AI. Thanks for listening and I'll catch you soon.