The Agentic AI Shift: What CXOs Need to Understand About the Next Phase of Enterprise AI

The shift from generative AI as a productivity tool to agentic AI as an autonomous operator of enterprise workflows is the most consequential technology transition that India's senior leaders need to understand in 2026. CXO India has been tracking the adoption of AI agent frameworks across a cohort of twenty large Indian enterprises and the findings are striking in their speed. In twelve months, the conversation has moved from "can we use AI to help employees write better emails?" to "can we deploy AI agents that autonomously manage our accounts payable workflow, escalate anomalies to human reviewers, and learn from those escalations to reduce future intervention rates?" These are fundamentally different propositions — the first augments human capability, the second delegates it. The governance frameworks that apply to the first are inadequate for the second. Boards and senior leaders need to develop what CXO India calls an "autonomous delegation framework" — a principled approach to deciding which enterprise decisions and processes can be delegated to AI agents with what levels of human oversight and what accountability mechanisms. The companies that are getting ahead of this challenge are those where the CTO and CFO are working together on the framework before deployment pressure makes the discussion reactive. The companies that are falling behind are those where AI agent deployment is happening at the team level, under the radar of executive governance, creating liability and operational risk that the board does not yet know it has assumed.