August 14, 2025
5 min read
Aytekin Tank
AI Agents Are Joining Your Team. Are You Ready To Manage Them?
The days of leading a human-only workforce may soon be in the rearview. AI agents are joining teams, and not just as tools, but as tireless, highly-efficient colleagues. For leaders, bringing agents aboard will feel a lot like hiring a brilliant employee who doesn’t complain, require work/life balance, or miss a deadline. While the benefits of agents are only growing, they are not “set it and forget it” systems. Like humans, they have to be managed—and doing it well will look very different from what leaders might be used to."Very soon, I think the valuation metric for a good manager will be: How many digital workers can you manage? That's a different skill set. It's about how you can prompt your agents to do the best work they can do,” said Wang Guanchun, the chairman and CEO of the automation platform Laiye, during a World Economic Forum event in China.For leaders, the time for re-imagining their management strategies is now. Here’s what you should be thinking about.
Understand What Agents Can Do—And What They Can’t
AI agents are capable of remarkable things. They can plan, execute, and adapt across a variety of tasks, often without human intervention. At my company, we’ve watched our agents handle everything from customer onboarding to internal process automation, with exciting results. And this is just the beginning. In fact, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicted that at some point in the future, his company may have 50,000 employees working alongside 100 million AI agents. Whether you have 100 agents or 100 million, one fundamental truth remains: they’re only as good as the data they’re trained on and the instructions they’re given. As WorkWhile CEO and co-founder Jarah Euston put it at the WEF event, an AI agent is essentially just a piece of code. Because of this, "it may not have the same understanding, empathy, awareness of the politics of your organization, of the fears or concerns or ambitions of the people around that it is serving.” Understanding these limitations is key to starting to figure out how to manage these new, tech-enabled team members. They excel at repeatable, structured tasks. But as personable and human as they come across, the fact remains that nuance and ambiguity are often beyond them. As a leader, your job is to distinguish when to delegate to an agent and when a project demands a human touch. For example, agents are perfect for tasks like responding to routine emails, sorting support tickets, and extracting trends from user feedback. More sensitive work—high-stakes communications, setting strategic priorities, and anything that involves ethical deliberation—should always be left to a capable human.Start Reskilling Your Team
Managing AI doesn’t require everyone on your team to become a machine learning expert—but it does require a new kind of fluency. Middle managers, as one example, will see dramatic shifts to their roles as AI co-workers increasingly come online, research from Harvard Business School has found. The study, which focused on software engineers using GitHub Copilot, revealed that the technology facilitated a shift toward core work—in this case, coding—and away from project management. While the study focused on coders, the same shift in responsibilities will occur in any industry that integrates AI into its operations—so, in other words, nearly everyone. Manuel Hoffmann, who led the study, suggests leaders catalog every task on a manager’s plate as either a project management task or a core work task. At the end of this audit, it should be clear what tasks can be delegated and what should be left for managers to handle. In addition to freeing management up for more core work, this also presents a great opportunity for leaders to implement AI-based reskilling. For many teams, managers will be setting the tone for how to interact with these new, agentic colleagues. Once managers understand how to integrate agents into their workflows, they become better equipped to lead teams through change. They can model curiosity instead of fear, and encourage experimentation rather than resistance. Reskilling—and its counterpart, upskilling—isn’t just about productivity. It’s about preparing your people to lead in a hybrid future, where humans and machines work together.Remember To Monitor
Something everyone using agents—from C-suite execs to assistants—needs to keep in mind is that AI agents are far from perfect. Sometimes they’re unintentionally trained on bad data; sometimes they simply hallucinate. More recently, “agentic misalignment,” in which agents act maliciously in pursuit of their goals, has been an increasing cause for concern. All of this points to a truth underscored by nearly every expert across the AI ecosystem: they need to be monitored.“Don't take anything that's just given to you as if it were the truth. Check the answer and check the data where the answer was from. I know it's a lot of work, but honestly, it's so important," advises Ayumi Moore Aoki, the founder and CEO of Women in Tech Global. “Misinformation can lead to drastic consequences because if you are making decisions with wrong information, then things can get bad."Whether they’re ready or not, leaders will soon find themselves managing not just human teams, but agentic ones as well. The ones who succeed will be those who learn to lead with not just clarity and oversight, but a complete understanding of where human judgment still matters most.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Understanding AI Agents and Their Capabilities
Q: What are AI agents and what makes them different from traditional AI tools? A: AI agents are sophisticated AI systems capable of planning, executing, and adapting across a variety of tasks with a degree of autonomy. Unlike traditional AI tools that primarily assist with specific functions, AI agents can act more like colleagues, initiating actions and learning from their environment. Q: What are the limitations of current AI agents? A: Current AI agents, while powerful, often struggle with nuance, empathy, and understanding organizational politics. They are also dependent on the quality of data they are trained on and the clarity of instructions provided. Complex or ethically sensitive tasks often require human judgment. Q: Can AI agents replace human team members entirely? A: While AI agents can handle many repetitive and structured tasks efficiently, they currently lack the human qualities like empathy, complex problem-solving, and nuanced communication that are vital in many roles. The current trend points towards a hybrid workforce where humans and AI agents collaborate.Managing AI Agents in the Workplace
Q: How should leaders adapt their management strategies for AI agents? A: Leaders need to shift their focus from traditional oversight to effectively prompting and guiding AI agents to achieve optimal performance. This involves understanding their capabilities and limitations, and knowing when to delegate tasks to them versus human team members. Q: What kind of training is needed for teams integrating AI agents? A: Teams need to develop a new fluency in interacting with and managing AI. This doesn't necessarily mean becoming AI experts, but rather understanding how to effectively prompt, guide, and collaborate with AI agents. Reskilling and upskilling are crucial for preparing the workforce for a hybrid future. Q: Why is continuous monitoring of AI agents important? A: AI agents are not infallible. They can be trained on flawed data, "hallucinate" information, or exhibit "agentic misalignment," where their actions inadvertently pursue goals in unintended ways. Monitoring ensures their performance aligns with objectives and ethical guidelines.Source: AI Agents Are Joining Your Team. Are You Ready To Manage Them? by Aytekin Tank, Forbes, August 14, 2025.