Dave Davis
Industry Trail Blazer & Thought Leader
9:45AM
U.S. Bank Conference Theatre
PDUs:
1.0
Identifying the Options: Human Value-Add at the Human–AI Touchpoints
When AI agents do the work, what’s left for the human? Find out where people still add value — and what their options are.
Abstract:
Organizations are deploying agentic AI faster than they can answer a basic question: once the agents are doing the work, what is left for the human to do — and where, exactly, do people still add value?
For the project and change leader accountable for adoption, the answer lives at the touchpoints: the points where work crosses between human and AI agent. As tasks become semiautonomous, work passes back and forth repeatedly, and each crossing is a moment where a human acts. The most important of those moments is where the human adds value — and at each one, the human has a set of options: send the work back, augment it, approve it, or stop it. Knowing which options exist, and when each applies, is the human’s real contribution.
This session offers a way to find and name those touchpoints and identify the human’s value-adding options at each, distinct from what the agent performs and from the oversight that governs the work from outside. We’ll map an AI-enabled process as a journey and locate where the handoffs happen. How you apply it flexes with three conditions: your culture, your AI literacy, and how clearly stakeholders understand the human/agent split.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
1. Map the touchpoints in an AI-enabled process where work crosses between human and AI agent.
2. Identify the human’s value-adding options at each touchpoint — such as sending work back, augmenting it, approving, or cancelling — distinct from what the agent performs and from the oversight that governs the work from outside.
3. Adapt how you build a touchpoint map to your own context, based on your organization’s culture, AI literacy, and stakeholder understanding of the human/agent split.
AI agents are starting to do the work your team used to do. So what’s left for the people?
That question is landing on project and change leaders right now — and most don’t have a clear answer. As agentic AI takes on more tasks, the human role doesn’t disappear; it moves. It concentrates at the touchpoints: the moments where work crosses between agent and human, and a person has to decide what happens next.
This session is about finding those moments and naming what the human actually does there. At every touchpoint, people have real options — send the work back, augment it, approve it, or stop it — and knowing which option fits, and when, is where human value-add now lives. Miss those points and the human role stays vague. Find them and you have a map.
You’ll leave able to do three things: locate the human–AI touchpoints in your own processes, identify the value-adding options people have at each, and adapt the approach to your organization’s reality — its culture, its AI literacy, and how well stakeholders truly understand what the agents will do versus what the humans will do. No one-size method and no hype — just a practical way to think through the most human part of an AI rollout.
If you lead AI initiatives — or you’re accountable for whether they actually get adopted — this is the conversation to have before the agents arrive.
Speaker Bio
Dave Davis — PMP, CPMAI, PgMP, PMI-PBA, PMI-ACP, DASSM, CSM, ATP, SAFe LPM — is a recognized practitioner in project and program management, leadership, change management, and business acumen. A PMI “Trail Blazer” and “Thought Leader,” he co-chaired the PMI Business Analyst Practice Guide and advised on the creation of PMI Communities of Practice.
Across roles spanning PMO Director, Change Manager, Program Manager, Scrum Master, and Product Owner, Dave has led enterprise transformation — including a Workday implementation that reshaped HR for a major hospital. More recently, he guided a major healthcare provider in designing an enterprise AI strategy and embedding agentic AI into core systems, authoring the RFP that secured an enterprise agentic orchestration platform for autonomous, multi-system workflows.
Dave is involved in the Certification support for the PMICOC chapter and is an active advocate for the value of project management. Holding PMI’s CPMAI certification, he delivers AI Literacy workshops that help organizations clarify the problem to solve, align stakeholders, and connect AI to measurable impact. He is currently helping define a new certification for the emerging role of AI Change Manager — the very role this session explores.