Our value moves from producing the artifact to owning the decision.
When agents do the analysis and the execution, roles, decision rights and accountability become the design problem.
The next trillion-dollarcompany is peopleand agents.Are you building it?
It is being built today. Agents will manage people and people will manage agents, and everything the organization leans on changes with it: how work is assigned, how performance is judged, how people are paid, how change is led.
- Former Chief Digital Innovation and Data Officer, EY Americas Assurance
- Enterprise firsts at Coca-Cola, UPS and EY
- DataIQ 100 North America 2025 (opens in a new tab)
What I do
Building it is five kinds of work.
Technology is the easy part. The company gets built in the change: leading it, deciding it, overseeing it, and teaching the people who have to carry it.
Leadership
Leading the enterprise through the change.
The mandate, the operating model and the outcomes, and the change management most companies leave out.
Advisory
Counsel to the leaders who own the change.
Chief executives and leadership teams: build, buy or partner; what to own outright; how fast governance can move without losing the review.
Boards
Oversight of the change, not only the technology.
Independent oversight of AI, data and digital transformation, for boards that need to be able to conclude no.
Writing
Changing how leaders think about the work.
People, Agents and the Work Between Them: essays on how the organization changes when agents join the team.
Speaking
Teaching it, and building the community around it.
Boards, offsites and summits, on what people and agents will do to the organization chart.
The vision
The work model is changing. Leadership has to change with it.
Three ideas about the change, where I have seen them play out, and what each asks of a leader.
Four phases of transformation: Curiosity, Friction, Pattern, Leverage.
Most organizations are in Friction. Naming the phase tells a leader what to decide next.
What to automate, and what judgment to keep.
Governance has to move at the speed of adoption without giving up the review.
People, Agents and the Work Between Them
All essays on Medium (opens in a new tab)Vision, substantiated
Setting the vision, innovating first, and leading the change from within.
Five enterprise firsts across three companies at Fortune 100 scale. Each began as a vision and ended as something that runs.
First production multi-agent AI
2×monthly active usersenterprise generative AI at Coca-Cola
Generative AI use nearly doubled once the enterprise offering was rebuilt around the workforce; agentic AI went from concept to production, with most governance reviews taking days, not weeks.
First enterprise Data and AI Strategy
$23M+a yearlogistics savings at UPS, from AI, analytics and automation
Savings delivered against a $500M five-year roadmap, on the one strategy the C-suite would sponsor: business ownership of data across eight domains and a Data and AI Center of Excellence.
First AI Center of Excellence, and two more firsts
4 to 300peopleEY’s Innovation and Digital services practice, in eighteen months
A practice that could sell what it built, grown to $30M+ in annualized services, alongside two more firsts at EY: the Delivery Center of Excellence and the first major cloud program.
Across the table
The questions boards and the C-suite ask me most.
Every question comes from a seat. My short answers go on the table; the long ones are in the writing. The question that is not here is usually the interesting one.
Chief executive asks
Where is the return, and why do our pilots stall?
On the tablePilots stall when nobody owns the data, the decision or the outcome. The return arrives when the business owns all three, under one strategy the C-suite sponsors and an operating model that makes ownership real.
Chief financial officer asks
What does it cost to run at scale?
On the tableMore than the licence. Tokens, tools, oversight and rework scale with use, not with seats. Give the unit economics an owner and the money moves from infrastructure to capability, where it should have been.
Chief people officer asks
What does this do to the organization and the work?
On the tableEverything the organization leans on changes: how work is assigned, how it is judged, how people are paid. Roles, decision rights and accountability become the design problem, and it belongs to the leadership team, not the technology function.
Audit committee chair asks
Who is accountable when an agent acts?
On the tableThe institution, always. So every agent gets a named business owner, a defined decision it may take, and a record of what it did. Accountability stays with people, by design, before the first agent goes live.
The chair asks
How do we oversee it without becoming the brake?
On the tableOversight has to move at the speed of adoption without giving up the review: risk-tiered, agent-assisted, and a board that can still conclude no. Done well, most reviews take days, not weeks.
The beard is real.
Recognition
- DataIQ 100 North America 2025 (opens in a new tab)Data and AI Leaders
- Speaker, DataIQ 100 Summit North America 2026 (opens in a new tab)April 2026
About Phani
Business, technology, data, people,
and now agents,
at the same table.
That is where I have spent my career.
Agents have the newest seat at the table,
and one I have been talking about since before it was set.
I am comfortable with the big question and with the detail that makes the answer hold up. I give leaders real decisions to own, and I hold business and technology to shared accountability for the result.
Developing people and creating business value belong in the same conversation. The best work I have done left the organization more capable than it found it.
For introductions
Phani Kambhampati is an AI, data and digital transformation executive in Atlanta, with enterprise firsts at Coca-Cola, UPS and EY, among them the first production multi-agent AI at Coca-Cola and the first enterprise Data and AI Strategy at UPS. He is a former Chief Digital Innovation and Data Officer for EY Americas Assurance, and writes the essay series People, Agents and the Work Between Them.
Career details
- The Coca-Cola Company
- Senior Director, AI and Emerging Technologies2024 to present
- UPS
- Senior Director, Enterprise Data, AI and Digital Strategy2020 to 2024Senior Director, Technology Transformation2019 to 2020
- EY
- Chief Digital Innovation and Data Officer, Americas Assurance2017 to 2019Associate Director, Delivery Transformation2017 to 2018Chief Architect, Assurance2016 to 2017
- IBM
- Lead Solutions Architect, Product Owner2008 to 2016
- Education
- MS Mechanical Engineering, University of New OrleansBTech Mechanical Engineering, JNTU Hyderabad
Let’s talk
Board, advisory and
executive conversations.
No 40-slide pre-read required.
If there’s an important question on the table, I’d like to hear it.