Hanan Ouazan
For decades, consulting thrived by delivering polished slide decks filled with frameworks and benchmarks. Today, generative AI swiftly generates these generic insights, rendering simple repackaging irrelevant. Clients now demand more: tangible products, measurable results, and operational improvements they can actually use.
Enter the Agentic Process Owner (APO)—an evolution of the Product Owner role that expands beyond functional delivery to take ownership of the underlying business processes. The APO doesn’t just ship features; they understand what the product is enabling, where it fits in the end-to-end process, and how to improve that process over time.
Their job starts with proper user discovery—through active listening, careful questioning, and real engagement with the field. But it doesn’t stop there. APOs also take the time to analyze how the broader process works: not just to insert AI on top of it, but to rethink how it could operate differently. The goal isn’t to automate broken steps—it’s to redesign the flow with intelligence, efficiency, and value creation in mind.
Importantly, they sit at the intersection of business and tech: aligning strategic goals and KPIs with real constraints—like data availability, system latency, and integration complexity. They also need a basic grasp of observability and supervision: not to build it themselves, but to understand how agent performance is measured and improved, and how to translate that into priorities for the team.
GenAI literacy is rapidly becoming a baseline—and that includes understanding how agentic systems operate. An APO doesn’t need to fine-tune models solo, but must grasp the essentials: when to use retrieval-augmented generation, how agent orchestration changes process design, what latency or token costs imply for ROI, and which security guardrails are non-negotiable. This enables them to brief technical teams clearly, pose the right questions, and craft a demo or prototype that concretely demonstrates impact. Clear execution, not polished rhetoric, wins stakeholder buy-in.
In short, the shift is profound: consultants who remain purely descriptive, without an ability to prototype or measure real outcomes, risk obsolescence. APOs who blend strategy with tangible, demonstrable delivery become essential. In the era of generative AI, shipping beats storytelling every time
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