CFOs and corporate leaders must now manage AI agents as a core leadership competency, raising questions about agent ownership, corporate structure, and executive accountability.

Author and MIT fellow Michael Schrage posed the question "Who's your agent?" to chief financial officers at a Fortune dinner cohosted with Deloitte and Salesforce in Boston, asking about AI agents—software programs created to autonomously take action on behalf of users and interact with other humans or programs. Attendees' responses ranged from those deploying personal AI agents to manage workflow, to those overseeing organizational agent creation and deployment, to those establishing guard rails before wider adoption.

The CFO role is shifting from cost controller to innovation enabler and measurer of AI investment risk-to-return ratios. Schrage distinguished between functional agents deployed across teams and personal agents acting on behalf of individuals, raising questions about IP ownership of digital twins and what happens to agents when their human creator leaves an organization.

According to Schrage's prediction, "CEOs will be judged as much for their agents as for their hires," requiring reimagined corporate workflows, employee assessment systems, and organizational design to accommodate cyborgs with the intelligence, skills, judgment, and authority of their human keepers.