Trust expert Rachel Botsman is current exhibiting her Roots of Trust installation at London’s Design Biennale. This display helps reimagine the world’s first org chart, designed in 1855.

The org chart is the centre of this installation as experts predict that it’s about to see the most radical changes in its 170yr history due to Agentic AI joining the workforce. Whether or not this happens hinges on what Botsman calls ‘a trust leap’.

A trust leap is a moment or decision to embrace uncertainty and take a risk by believing in, or relying on, something or someone without complete evidence or certainty.

Salesforce made this leap regarding Agentic AI. They recently became the latest company to reimagine their org chart by replacing 5,000 staff with AI agents.

But not all businesses are Salesforce. And coming into 2025, Accenture’s Pulse of Change Index showed businesses feel less prepared for change than they did a year ago. This means not all businesses will take the trust leap and inject Agentic AI into their workforce like Salesforce.

Insight Teams can be pivotal in helping businesses understand if they should make the trust leap – with as few evidence gaps as possible – and use Agentic AI in customer facing roles. Here’s how:

Connecting EX and CX

In 1990 Sharp Healthcare CEO Michael Murphy stated that it wasn’t possible to give patients a high quality experience if the firm didn’t give its staff an employee experience where they felt valued and empowered. Work by Gallup has since reinforced this.

Insight Teams – who often focus on the market or customer – should expand their remit to understanding employees to see if this rings true in their business. Because if it does, businesses will need to reflect it in how Agents are trained and managed.

Identify the human and agentic moments

As Agents enter the workforce businesses will have to decide where they have Agentic touchpoints and where they have human ones. This means understanding where consumers expect human touchpoints. And where there’s a chance to surprise and delight with a human touchpoint where competitors don’t have one.

Understanding how to match moments with interaction type needs insight. Especially on identifying the moments where a business is risking customer churn. Or can generate loyalty. Because these will be the moments where businesses will need humans – not agents.

Understand signalling

Agentic workers are cheaper than human ones. This makes using them an efficiency and cost reduction exercise. However, Insight Teams need to help businesses understand moments where embracing the change from human to Agentic workers risks falling foul to the Doorman Fallacy.

The Doorman Fallacy is the term Rory Sutherland uses to describe how a hotel may replace a door attendant for an electric door to save money. But in doing so removes a doorman’s intangible value: hailing taxis, recognising customers and signalling the hotel’s status. And is a risk of adopting Agentic customer facing workers that a cost-saving estimate won’t pick-up.  

Learning to leap little-by-little

Humans don’t like change. And customers won’t like the change of going from interacting with humans to being entirely interacting on Agents if business make the shift too fast and too dramatically.

This means that Insight Teams need to be able to understand the phasing and order in which business put Agentic workers in customer facing roles and advise accordingly.

Phasing out of other technologies can give us some guidance. Videos took 15 years to phase out. Cheques 11 years. Diesel cars 5 years. is important because it gives people a frame of reference for how long big changes should take.

Identify where leaping = losing

We’re all influenced by what others do. And this applies to business decisions as well as personal ones. This means often businesses will make decisions based on what their competitors do. Or what how businesses they aspire to be like act.

This is amplified when – like with Agentic AI – the decision can increase profits via cost cutting. Insight Teams have a role – and responsibility – to ensure that business leaders aren’t swayed by what the category is doing. Or what the Finance Department say the benefits are. The positives from Agentic AI in customer facing roles are obvious. The negatives less so. And Insight Teams should support business decisions in this area by understanding the rewards and risks of embracing this change. Even if doing so means contradicting the wider businesses thoughts.