Creative workers won’t be replaced by AI—but their roles will change to become ‘directors’ managing AI agents, executives say

AI won’t automate creative jobs—but the way workers do them is about to change fundamentally. That’s according to executives from some of the world’s largest enterprise companies who spoke at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco earlier this week.

“Most of us are producers today,” Nancy Xu, Vice President of AI and Agentforce at Salesforce, told the audience. “Most of what we do is we take some objective and we say, Okay, my goal is now to spend the next eight hours today to figure out how to chase after this customer, or increase my CSAT score, or to close this amount of revenue.”

With AI agents handling more tasks, Xu said that workers will shift “from producers to more directors.” Instead of asking “how do I accomplish the goal?” they’ll instead focus on “what are the g