The AI industry is building autonomous agents: software that acts on your behalf, makes decisions, executes multi-step workflows while you do something else. The pitch is seductive. Why do the work when the machine can do it for you? Delegate to AI, let it handle the rest, check back when it's done. We think there's a better approach: instead of building agents that replace humans, build Capabilities that turn humans into superagents.
What's a Capability
A Capability packages domain expertise into three components:
- Knowledge contains decision rules, edge cases, quality criteria, and annotated examples that define what good looks like in a specific domain.
- Skills are procedures with explicit inputs, outputs, and validation logic that can be invoked on demand.
- Tools are authenticated connections to external systems the Capability needs to do its job.
When someone invokes a Capability, they get access to expertise they don't personally have, but they remain in control of the decision. A junior analyst with the right Capability can produce work that used to require a senior specialist, not because the Capability does the work for them, but because it provides the scaffolding for them to do better work themselves.
Agentic organizations
An agentic organization is one where people can act without waiting for permission, without routing through specialists, without the coordination overhead that kills momentum. The bottleneck in most companies isn't intelligence or willingness, it's two things: expertise locked in specific people's heads, and command-and-control structures that require approvals at every step. The experts become queues. The approval chains become drag. Everyone else waits.
Capabilities dissolve these bottlenecks by making expertise invocable. The knowledge that was trapped in one person becomes available to anyone who needs it. You don't replace the expert, you scale what they know. The organization becomes agentic not because AI agents run autonomously, but because humans can act autonomously when they have the right Capabilities at their disposal.
Human as superagent
A superagent is someone who can operate across domains they weren't trained in, move faster than their calendar would normally allow, and produce outputs at a quality level that used to require specialized teams. This isn't about replacing expertise with AI, it's about distributing expertise through AI so that more people can act on it.
The models are commoditizing. Everyone will have access to the same reasoning engines. What won't commoditize is the organizational knowledge encoded in your Capabilities: the tacit expertise of your best people, made explicit, version-controlled, and scalable across your entire organization.
Build Capabilities. Turn your people into superagents.