The Hidden Workforce Behind the Work

How much of your team’s day is spent getting work ready for someone else?

Find the service history. Check whether the part is available. Track down the missing information. Copy the update into another system. Follow up because the request stopped moving.

Somebody has to do all of that. And it adds up.

That’s what I want to talk about at the AEM Annual Conference, November 10–12 in Tucson. I’ll be speaking about agentic workflows and the hidden workforce.

What I mean by the hidden workforce

I’m talking about agents working in the background of the processes your people already use. Gathering information. Preparing the next step. Keeping track of what’s missing. Helping the work reach the right person.

Picture a dealer receiving a service request.

Before someone can give the customer a useful answer, they may need equipment details, service history, parts availability, and input from another department. The customer sees the wait. The team sees the chasing.

With the right connections and permissions, an agent could help gather that information, flag the gaps, and prepare a response for review. If something doesn’t line up, it should bring that exception to a person with enough context to make a decision.

That’s a practical place to start.

Start with the handoff

For me, the interesting question is: Where does work keep getting stuck?

Maybe a request arrives without the information needed to act on it. Maybe someone has to move the same information between three systems. Maybe a follow-up depends on one person remembering it while doing twelve other things.

Those are the workflows I want us to examine together.

What starts the process? What information does it need? What can an agent do within its permissions? Where does a person need to approve the next step? How will we know the work was completed correctly?

The people doing the job need to help answer those questions. They know the exceptions that never made it into the process document.

Bring the annoying process

I’m looking forward to making this a practical, interactive workshop. We’ll work through where agents could help and how to keep people involved in the decisions that matter.

Bring the process that makes your team say, “Why are we still doing this by hand?”

The parts lookup. The service handoff. The follow-up that somehow becomes six emails.

A big thank-you to the folks at AEM for inviting me back. I’m excited to see friends across the equipment industry and hear what everyone is working on.

What’s one handoff your team is tired of chasing?

Join us at AEM Annual, November 10–12, 2026, in Tucson, Arizona.

Look for the guy in the hat.