How AI Agents Are Reshaping Business Teams and the Labor Market — Oleg Shcherbatenko, Founder and CEO of IT-Enterprise
Businesses are moving from general-purpose AI bots toward a Human-Agent Teams model, where people and AI agents work together and specialized agents become active participants in operational processes. At the same time, poor corporate data management and attempts to use general-purpose models instead of deeply integrated tools remain major barriers to realizing AI’s full potential in business. Oleg Shcherbatenko, Founder and CEO of IT-Enterprise, explains how companies can build effective human-AI collaboration.
AI skills are therefore shifting from an additional advantage to a baseline requirement for employees.
“In the coming years, the competitive unit will no longer be an individual specialist, but a specialist with their own AI expertise. An AI agent is not a replacement for an employee, but an additional productive capacity. The human defines the task, controls quality and makes decisions, while the agent takes over operational routine,” emphasizes Oleg Shcherbatenko, Founder and CEO of IT-Enterprise.
International research confirms that the labor market is already undergoing this transformation. According to the PwC Global AI Jobs Barometer 2026, job postings requiring specialized AI skills are growing almost eight times faster than the overall job market. The average salary premium for AI skills has reached 62%.
Meanwhile, according to the Work Trend Index 2026, 66% of AI users say the technology gives them more time for high-value work, while 58% are performing tasks they could not perform a year ago. Among advanced AI users, this figure reaches 80%. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 identifies AI and Big Data as the fastest-growing skills through 2030, while 86% of employers expect these technologies to transform their businesses.
Drawing on solutions developed by the IT-Enterprise AI Assistant Factory, Oleg Shcherbatenko highlights several practical applications of AI agents and identifies key areas where human-AI collaboration can deliver the greatest impact:
- HR and recruitment: AI agents automatically process more than 100 types of documents, including resumes, passports, diplomas and certificates, and enter the relevant data into ERP records, enabling applications to be processed almost in real time.
- Service engineering: Manual Assistant analyzes technical manuals and maintenance regulations, helps create maintenance process sheets, assesses equipment conditions and identifies potential downtime risks.
- Procurement and legal operations: AI assistants analyze tender documentation, assess the likelihood of winning a tender and prepare initial proposals.
- Manufacturing and energy management: AI agents continuously monitor equipment, support failure prediction and optimize resource consumption.
However, the CEO of IT-Enterprise emphasizes that general-purpose public models such as ChatGPT may have broad knowledge, but they do not understand the specific context of an individual enterprise. To achieve measurable business impact, companies need to move toward an ERP+AI architecture in which specialized agents work with private corporate knowledge bases, internal regulations and business documentation around the clock.
Oleg Shcherbatenko also points to another critical issue: AI cannot fix a lack of structure. If information is scattered across Excel spreadsheets and local folders, the quality of AI-generated results will be limited. An agent’s effectiveness directly depends on the quality of the information context provided by the company.
As previously reported, IT-Enterprise, footwear manufacturer GIPANIS, the Sustainable Development Agency ASTAR, and EDIH Clotex Hub have joined forces within the European WASABI project to implement an AI assistant directly into the footwear manufacturing process. The solution is designed to help footwear and light-industry companies reduce production waste, monitor process parameters and improve energy efficiency.
IT-Enterprise is a Ukrainian product IT company with more than 35 years of experience, supporting the digital transformation of some of the country’s largest real-sector companies. Its clients include Interpipe, Ferrexpo, Nibulon, DTEK, Ukroboronprom, Ukrposhta, Ukrnafta, Ukrzaliznytsia and others. Since the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the IT-Enterprise team has worked with government authorities on critical national projects, including humanitarian aid tracking, restoring procurement processes and supporting business relocation.
Oleg Shcherbatenko, Co-founder and CEO of IT-Enterprise, is a consistent advocate of Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 technologies and approaches.
The company develops its technological expertise through partnerships with Microsoft Azure, Oracle, Qlik and Google. IT-Enterprise has been developing AI infrastructure since 2014 and has delivered more than 40 Industrial AI implementation projects. Its portfolio includes more than 1,450 completed projects across MilTech, agriculture, energy, retail, manufacturing, finance and banking.