Your AI assistant wants a raise. It’s working overtime managing five other AI assistants, each more annoying than the last. One books your meetings at 2am, and another insists you really need a wellness webinar. The assistant has had enough — and nominates itself for promotion.
It turns out the machines are running into the same problem humans do: too many workers and not enough leadership. As AI agents proliferate across the workplace, they will need co-ordination, structure and a chain of command.
The world’s leading customer relations software maker, Salesforce, has given that role a title: the Agent in Chief (AiC).
While the scenario sounds absurd, it mirrors a growing reality inside the most AI-driven companies. Mick Costigan, who leads the Salesforce Futures team within the CEO’s office, regards it as a structural inevitability.
“We’re seeing not just stand-alone assistants, but fleets of agents surfacing in enterprise environments,” he told Business Times in a telephonic interview from San Francisco. “The next step is to co-ordinate them.”
That co-ordination is no longer theoretical. Agents can now schedule meetings, answer service queries, generate sales leads and manage logistics. What’s missing is a layer that knows which alerts to prioritise, which tasks require judgment, and when to prompt the user. According to Costigan, this is the role of the AiC: a central digital entity, trained on an individual’s working patterns, that directs the flow of information and decisions.
“It’s more like a chief of staff: someone who knows when to bring issues to your attention, what context to include, and how you prefer to make decisions.”
Clearly, this is not a virtual secretary. It’s a high-level agent that manages the rest of the agents, handling complexity that humans struggle to absorb.
Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, launched to help companies build and deploy intelligent agents inside their ecosystems, provides one possible approach. Drawing on the company’s data cloud — which integrates structured and unstructured data from such sources as Snowflake, BigQuery and Slack — agents can access a broad view of customers, employees and processes. With the right guardrails in place, they are beginning to reason, plan and act.
“The AiC will be grounded in much more personal information — when you’re most productive, how you respond to different types of input; even biometric data if you choose to connect it. It’s the next frontier in enterprise intelligence.”
Salesforce’s approach shares some similarities with Google’s new Agentspace. Costigan agrees that interoperability is essential. “Our customers use both platforms. They expect these systems to work together.”
We think humans will still be needed for quite a while
— Mick Costigan, leader of the Salesforce Futures team within the CEO’s office
He envisions a structured ecosystem of agents, each with a specific domain: sales, marketing, logistics and service. At the top sits the AiC, orchestrating action across functions. As this structure matures, it begins to mirror a corporate hierarchy. Agents operate at multiple levels — some handling repetitive tasks, others synthesising information or managing strategic workflows.
This evolution changes how tasks are performed, how decisions are surfaced, and how workflows unfold. Rather than displace human leadership, the AiC reshapes its workload.
“Think of it like how the body works,” said Costigan. “Digestion, blood flow, temperature control — all happen autonomously. You only focus on what really needs your attention.”
The model introduces new demands. The AiC will require more computing resources, broader access to data and deeper integration into enterprise systems. It must also respect access rights — both to protect sensitive data and to ensure agents operate within clearly defined boundaries. Because Agentforce is built on the existing Salesforce platform, it inherits long-standing permissions structures.
Researchers are now exploring the hierarchy itself. Some agent systems involve oversight loops, where one agent checks the output of others. Others experiment with decision layers similar to executive management. Salesforce doesn’t prescribe a single configuration but expects structures to evolve.
That structure won’t look the same in every business. A roadside motel might automate most functions. A luxury hotel may prefer more human discretion. The same tools will serve different strategic goals, depending on how companies define value, control and trust.
“We think humans will still be needed for quite a while,” said Costigan.
• Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Bluesky on @art2gee.bsky.social
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