Workers Are Becoming AI Managers, Without Pay Raise, Promotion

AI promises to make employees more productive. It may also turn them into managers of AI bots — without a promotion or pay increase. 

According to a recent Business Insider report, AI is changing the workday for many employees. Employees face pressure to use the technology and consequently spend more time managing AI bots that do tasks humans were initially hired to do, like teaching, coding, writing or designing. They now spend less time on work responsibilities related to their professions and more time managing bots that do work for them. 

For many workers, AI now comes with management responsibilities. They must tell agents what to do, review their output, ask for changes and step in when something goes wrong. Other employees spend much of their time checking AI-generated work and remain accountable for everything that gets published or sold. 

The idea that AI could turn every worker into a manager has been around for years. Now, companies are putting it into practice.

Salesforce recently introduced “job-ready agents” for sales, customer service, ecommerce and internal operations. The company is also giving employees tools to train those agents and improve their results.

At the same time, IT service provider Wipro has seen massive productivity improvements due to AI. The company’s chief technology officer, Sandhya Arun, said in an interview with Business Insider that AI has added the productivity equivalent of 20,000 workers. She imagines a future in which one engineer can manage a group of agents.

Meanwhile, at Daytona, a 30-person AI startup, CEO Ivan Burazin recently told Business Insider that each of its 16 engineers oversees about five AI agents on average. He said employees there no longer write code themselves.

The pros and cons of managing AI

Sinda Khenine became a software engineer because she wanted to build things. But today, much of her job involves overseeing the AI systems that do much of that building for her, she told Business Insider.

Khenine, a software and AI engineer at Electrolux who is also starting her own AI business, says that on the pro side, agents have helped her write more code and build a company on her own. That’s something that would have been “10 times harder” before, she acknowledged.

However, the trade-off is that she spends less time on the hands-on engineering work she originally loved. Instead, she picks the models, gives them context and rules, checks their work and pieces together output from several agents into a finished product.

“The effort is more focused on the coordination itself rather than the engineering problem that we are solving in the first place,” Khenine told Business Insider. 

Khenine also manages people at Electrolux, but she said overseeing AI agents can be even more demanding. Agents need extensive setup, and they require continued attention after they start working.

“It’s like a loop,” she says. “You need to monitor the results, you need to see the progress. You need to decide if you need to rerun or finish the job.”

AI promises to make employees more productive. It may also turn them into managers of AI bots — without a promotion or pay increase. 

According to a recent Business Insider report, AI is changing the workday for many employees. Employees face pressure to use the technology and consequently spend more time managing AI bots that do tasks humans were initially hired to do, like teaching, coding, writing or designing. They now spend less time on work responsibilities related to their professions and more time managing bots that do work for them. 

For many workers, AI now comes with management responsibilities. They must tell agents what to do, review their output, ask for changes and step in when something goes wrong. Other employees spend much of their time checking AI-generated work and remain accountable for everything that gets published or sold.