Cybersecurity professionals
From “monitor” to “strategist”: AI agents can take over the repetitive work of scanning logs and prioritizing alerts at a speed no human can match. This frees up cybersecurity analysts to focus on complex challenges, such as threat hunting, creating proactive defenses and outsmarting sophisticated, AI-driven attacks. For example, a security professional might not manually write rules for a firewall; instead, they might oversee an AI agent that autonomously detects and remediates a security incident, such as isolating a compromised device and blocking malicious traffic, while the human strategist analyzes the attack’s origin to update future defense protocols.
Data engineers & data architects
From “cleaner” to “influencer”: AI can automate many of the tedious but manual processes of data cleaning, preparation and quality monitoring. This “shifts up” data professionals to higher-level, strategic functions, such as designing robust data architectures that align with business goals and leveraging data to create a competitive advantage. Rather than writing ETL scripts, a data engineer might instruct an agent to create and maintain a complex data pipeline from multiple sources, with the human’s role shifting to supervising the agent’s output and validating that the data architecture is optimized for real-time insights and is compliant with data governance policies.
Sales and marketing
From “manual executor” to “augmented creative”: AI agents can handle multi-step, complex tasks like lead generation, personalized outreach and managing campaigns at scale. This allows human salespeople and marketers to move from transactional work to building strategic relationships and crafting a core narrative. For example, a marketer might not manually create and A/B test ad variations. Instead, they might supervise a creative agent that generates thousands of ad variations, runs the tests and optimizes the campaign in real time, while the human focuses on defining the brand’s core message and the overall creative strategy.
