Chapter 3: The brownfield reality - and the need for a shift

Most companies aren’t starting from scratch. They’re not shiny startups with clean architectures and no legacy weight.

They’re complex, established, deeply interwoven enterprises — built over years, sometimes decades — through mergers, reorganizations, systems upgrades, regulatory demands, and the sheer inertia of scale.

In other words, most enterprises today are brownfield, not greenfield.

And yet, these very organizations are now facing the most significant operating shift since the birth of the digital era.

AI is no longer just automating tasks. It is beginning to take on decisions — real decisions — the kind that shape customer experience, cost, risk, speed, and value.

This creates a profound tension:

How does a brownfield enterprise become agentic without tearing everything down and starting over?

That is the challenge of our time.

Because continuing to operate as we have — with rigid processes, escalating approvals, siloed functions, and hidden decision logic — cannot deliver the speed, adaptability, or intelligence the next decade demands.

We’re entering an era where the organizations that thrive will be those that can:

• sense what is happening,
• understand what it means,
• decide what to do,
• take action,
• and learn from the result — with far less friction, delay, and dependency on human bottlenecks.

This is not about replacing people. It’s about augmenting the enterprise so that humans focus on judgment and creativity, while agents handle the repeatable, the detectable, the predictable.

But before any enterprise can design an agentic operating model, it must first understand the shifts it needs to make — not the technical ones, but the structural, cultural, and architectural ones.

The shifts from:

• workflows to decisions,
• hierarchy to autonomy,
• task owners to decision owners,
• process maps to decision architectures,
• automation as execution to automation as intelligence

This chapter lays out those shifts — the foundational mindsets and structural evolutions that any brownfield enterprise must embrace in order to become agentic.

Not the “how.” Not yet.

This chapter is about the what and the why — the deep changes in how work, decisions, teams, and value itself are understood. Once you see the enterprise through this new lens, the path to an agentic operating model becomes both intuitive and inevitable.

Let’s begin the journey.

1. From workflows and roles → to decisions and autonomy

Today: Everything is a process. Order-to-cash. Hire-to-retire. Incident-to-resolution. Each step belongs to someone. And the work moves along like a factory conveyor. Inside those workflows, decisions happen silently — tucked into the corners of SOPs, approvals, and escalations. No one ever writes down the decision logic.

It’s just “how Matt does it” or “how we’ve always handled these cases.”

North Star: In the agentic enterprise, decisions become visible. They are designed, owned, measured. They have guardrails, autonomy levels, and value metrics. And the magic is this:

Work doesn’t flow anymore — decisions flow. And everything else organizes around them.

Outcome:

Your organization becomes faster because the decision logic is no longer trapped inside processes. It becomes a first-class citizen.

2. From hierarchy decides → to autonomy decides

Today: when something unfamiliar happens, what do people do? They escalate. A junior person flags it to a senior person. They loop in a manager. Maybe a director joins a call. Someone schedules a review.

Hours go by. Sometimes days. The hierarchy decides.

North Star: In an agentic enterprise, autonomy decides. A decision node knows: what it can decide, where the limits are, when to ask for help, and how to self-correct.

Humans step in only when the situation is ambiguous, sensitive, or novel. This doesn’t remove their judgment — it elevates it.

Outcome:

Your enterprise becomes responsive, not reactive. Decisions happen at the speed of the situation, not the speed of the org chart.

3. From teams that execute tasks → to teams that own decisions

Today: Have you ever noticed that most teams today describe themselves by what they do? “We close claims.”, “We resolve tickets.”, “ We analyze fraud.”, “We process invoices.”

Tasks define identity.

North Star: In the agentic enterprise, that identity shifts: “We own fraud detection.”, “We own claim severity classification.”, “We own remediation decisions.”, “We own pricing.”

Teams become owners of the decisions that matter — and therefore the value that follows.

Outcome:

People move from “do more” to “decide better.” Their success becomes tied to accuracy, speed, customer value, and risk — not volume of output.

4. From processes guiding work → to architectures guiding decisions

Today: Most organizations today run on: SOPs, Process maps, Tickets, Checklists, RACI charts.

These documents tell people what to do next — not how value is created.

North Star: The agentic enterprise replaces process maps with architectures:

1. Work Architecture (who does what — human vs agent)
2. Decision Architecture (autonomy + guardrails)
3. Value Architecture (data + economics)

These architectures don’t just describe work. They shape it. They make the organization legible, measurable, and evolvable.

Outcome:

You don’t just run the business — you can finally redesign it in a principled way.

5. From automation = tasks → to automation = decisions

Today: automation means: a bot clicking buttons, a script triggering an alert, a workflow opening a ticket.

Still dependent on people deciding what to do.

North Star: The agentic enterprise flips this: Agents don’t just execute tasks. They make decisions. They detect → decide → act → learn. They become co-pilots, operators, decision-makers.

Humans supervise. Agents handle the repeatable judgment.

Outcome:

Automation moves from efficiency to intelligence — from doing things faster to deciding things better.

6. From static org design → to a living decision network

Today: Open any org chart and you’ll see fixed boxes (e.g., Operations, Marketing, IT, Risk, Claims, HR).

Inside org chart boxes you will see - Roles. Functions. Titles.

North Star: The world doesn’t operate in boxes — it operates in flows. In the agentic enterprise, the organization becomes a neural network of decision nodes. Nodes can be created, retired, merged, or elevated.

Value chains organize work. Decision flows guide execution.

Outcome:

The organization becomes dynamic — able to adapt as quickly as the market does.

7. From everything escalates → to most things self-resolve

Today, escalation is a way of life. Escalate the incident. Escalate the claim. Escalate the exception. Escalate the approval.

Escalation the default coordination mechanism.

North Star: In the agentic enterprise, escalation becomes the exception. Not because people care less — but because autonomy handles more. Decision nodes self-resolve.

Agents handle the straightforward and the obvious. Humans handle the novel and the nuanced.

Outcome:

Your enterprise stops scaling OPEX linearly with complexity — and finally breaks the cost curve.

8. From data for reporting → to data for decisioning

Today: data is something you look at.

Dashboards. BI reports. KPIs.

North Star: In the agentic enterprise, data is something the system thinks with. Agents read logs, metrics, documents, behaviors. They update models. They improve decisions.

Continuous learning becomes part of the operating fabric.

Outcome:

Data stops being retrospective — it becomes operational and predictive.

9. From productivity = more people → to productivity = more autonomy

Today: This is the big one. For decades, productivity has been defined as: more tickets closed, more claims processed, more customers served, more tasks done, more headcount added

North Star: In an agentic enterprise, productivity is something else entirely: It is the number of decisions made autonomously — safely, accurately, and instantly. Humans shift into higher judgment. Agents take over repeatable decision patterns. Capacity scales without adding people.

Outcome:

You unlock a new productivity frontier — one built on intelligence, not effort.

Bringing It All Together

These nine shifts aren’t minor adjustments. They aren’t “enhancements” or “optimizations.” They represent a fundamental rethinking of how a brownfield enterprise works.

A shift from processes to decisions.

From hierarchy to autonomy.

From task-owners to decision-owners.

From static org charts to living decision networks.

From data for reporting to data for action.

From productivity through effort to productivity through intelligence.

If your organization has been built over decades — with legacy systems, layered processes, and deeply ingrained ways of working — this can feel like standing at the edge of something vast and unfamiliar.

But this shift isn’t about tearing everything down.

It’s about revealing what has always been hidden inside the enterprise: the decisions that create value.

Once those decisions become visible, everything else becomes designable.

And This Leads Us to the Next Step

Because understanding these shifts is only half the story.

The natural next question becomes:

If the enterprise is no longer organized around processes and departments, then what is the new backbone of the organization?

The answer:

Your value chain — redesigned to be both customer-focused and decision-oriented.

In the next chapter, we’ll explore exactly how to do that.

• How to start from the customer’s real Jobs-to-Be-Done
• How to translate those jobs into a coherent value chain
• How to map that chain into decision nodes
• And how those nodes become the foundational units of autonomy in your operating model

This is where the transformation moves from mindset → architecture → operating reality.

The next chapter is where the agentic enterprise begins to take shape.