Agentic Work Systems

Efforts to put autonomous agents to work in organizations have largely proceeded by building new coordination machinery: an orchestration graph, a planner, a bespoke protocol by which agents divide labor among themselves. We argue that the machinery already exists. Every organization runs its work as a state machine — items moving through states under entry and exit criteria, with an assignee, attached artifacts, and a history — and has done so since before software. The proposal of this paper is narrow and, we think, consequential: leave that process untouched, and admit agents as executors of a subset of its transitions.