Brian Solis Included in Wharton AI Agent Adoption Blueprint

ServiceNow's Head of Global Innovation, Brian Solis, was included in "The Wharton Blueprint for AI Agent Adoption," a report produced by Wharton Human-AI Research and Science Says, according to a May 31, 2026 post on BrianSolis.com. The post summarizes the report's central claim that AI agent adoption is shifting from a technical barrier to a psychological barrier and that Wharton organizes adoption frictions into three areas: perceived competence, trust, and delegation of control. The post quotes Solis directly: "Giving up tasks is not the issue; employees do not want to lose their identity or give up agency," and "Design agents like employees you'd like to hire and manage," both attributed to the BrianSolis.com post. The blog entry also lists other contributors named in the report, including academics and practitioners from Google, Zapier, Wolters Kluwer, Workato, and others.

Industry-pattern observations: research and practitioner commentary about AI agents increasingly emphasizes transparency, auditability, and human-in-the-loop governance rather than raw capability improvements. The Wharton framing of three adoption frictions-competence, trust, and control-aligns with prior literature on human-agent teaming that highlights explainability and role definitions as adoption enablers.

Editorial analysis: For enterprise teams exploring agent deployments, the report and Solis' quoted recommendations foreground nontechnical adoption levers: clear role definitions, permissions and escalation paths, onboarding analogous to hiring, and human management of agent behavior. These items are positioned by Solis as practical design and governance elements to increase user comfort with delegation.

For practitioners: monitor whether vendor road maps and internal pilots start to publish agent job descriptions, permission models, and audit trails as discrete features. Observers should also watch for broader adoption studies that measure whether agent transparency and onboarding practices measurably raise delegation rates or task handoff velocity.

The BrianSolis.com entry includes several direct lines attributed to Solis: "AI agents are too often built in the image of yesterday's workflows. If we build agents that expose their decision logic in business terms people use, we gain agentic empathy, trust built through auditable reasoning," and "Agents need human managers. They will not behave like Agent Smith in the Matrix and take over your entire enterprise. Human oversight, governance, and training are essential in managing and collaborating with agents." These are reported as quotes in the blog post and summarize Solis' contribution to the Wharton report.