Giving AI agents names and a spot on the org chart makes people feel less accountable for the work, and it squeezes the agent into a role it doesn't need.

Dave Sharrock and Peter Maddison dig into new research from the September/October 2026 issue of Harvard Business Review on what happens when organizations add named AI agents to the org chart. When people use AI as a tool, they own the result and check it carefully. When the same work comes from a personified agent, accountability quietly shifts to the software, and nobody is really holding it. Peter connects this to the idea of accountability sinks, the layers in an organization where responsibility disappears. They also talk about review fatigue, the growing pile of AI-generated documents, slides, and code that someone still has to read, understand, and sign off on. Onboarding an agent like a new hire still makes sense. Leaving it on the org chart with a name is where the trouble starts.

This week's takeaways:
- How people work alongside capable AI agents is still poorly understood, and the old problems of ownership, accountability, and decision making do not go away just because an agent is involved.
- Review fatigue is real and getting worse, because cheap generation still means expensive human review for every artifact someone has to approve.
- Naming an agent into a human role limits it to the shape of that role, while treating it as a tool in the workflow lets it work across boundaries in ways a person cannot.

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