SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.—Executives gathered here at the Fortune COO Summit on June 1 didn’t just debate technology. They wrestled with a deeper question. Should companies treat AI agents as colleagues? The room split. Some saw agents as the next members of the team. Others warned that label invites trouble. No easy consensus emerged. Yet one point rang clear. The way leaders frame these systems will shape everything from org charts to trust levels inside companies. One COO’s Radical Experiment Eric Kelleher, president and COO of Okta, has already crossed a line many peers still eye warily. He named his agents. Leo. Sloan. Hank. Walker. They appear in business reviews right next to human staff. “In that exercise, AI became a colleague as opposed to a tool and that catalyst is valuable,” Kelleher told the summit, according to a Fortune article . He went further. Kelleher booked a flight to Bangalore. The entire trip he stood up an open-source agent on a separate machine.…