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The Problem with Being an Agent Boss
AI agents promise relief from the infinite workday, but delegating to digital teams may create new pressures that leave employees carrying an even heavier load.
I recently read a Microsoft blog post about how Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents help to tackle the infinite workday. Although the blog post paints a rosy picture of how agents can empower end users by allowing each user to manage their own team of AI bots (agents), I just don't think that in the real world, things would play out in the way that the blog post predicts. To me, the idea seems to be dystopian rather than empowering.
The basic idea behind the article is that AI can help overworked employees to manage a seemingly impossible workload. So far so good. After all, I doubt that anyone would dispute the idea that people are overworked. According to the blog post, 40 percent of people are already online at 6:00 a.m., reading email messages and planning for the day. The article goes on to say that the average employee receives over 100 email messages and over 150 Teams messages every day and that more than 50 of those Teams messages are received outside of normal business hours. The so-called infinite workday is based on the idea that so many organizations expect users to always be online and available, regardless of the time of day. In many companies, the demands being made of employees are nothing short of corporate exploitation.
Although businesses often attempt to squeeze every last bit of productivity out of users by making them work insanely long hours, humans are only capable of working so many hours in a day. Many businesses are reaching the point at which it is becoming impossible to squeeze any additional productivity from users without adding staff. This is where AI comes into play.
The previously mentioned blog post discusses the idea of empowering every employee to become an agent boss. The idea is that organizations will be made up of both human and virtual employees. End users can essentially become the boss of their own personal team of digital employees (agents) and by delegating tasks to those agents, the users' time is freed up for working on higher level tasks.
This idea might sound good in theory, but it is really nothing more than using AI to scale end user productivity. By using agents, companies can conceivably squeeze exponentially more productivity out of already overworked employees, thereby making the company more profitable.
Admittedly, agents have their place. When properly used, agents can be a tool that can help employees to work smarter. However, that isn't what the blog post is talking about. It specifically discusses the idea that end users will become agent bosses and that agents can be treated much like human employees. In fact, the article even mentions the absurd notion of conducting performance reviews for agents and upskilling underperformers.
The idea of having performance reviews for virtual employees is a ridiculous notion. After all, what happens if a virtual employee does a bad job. Can you fire them? Can you put them on probation? And what if the agent receives an exceptionally good performance review? Does the agent get promoted? Will human employees start being passed over for promotions because an organization would rather use an agent to fill a position?
I also can't help but to wonder about the manager who is tasked with writing these performance reviews for agents. There will presumably be a situation in which a manager oversees both human and virtual employees and is writing performance reviews for both. Sooner or later there is going to be pressure for these managers to hold humans and agents to the same standards.
I could go on and on about all the ethical and logistical problems of an infinite workday and of the concept of agent bosses. In reality. An agent boss is nothing more than an already overworked employee who is now tasked with babysitting bots. At best it's dehumanizing. At worst, it opens the door for even more corporate monitoring and micromanagement of employees.
Of course, at their core, agents are designed to act as productivity tools. While there is nothing wrong with helping employees to be more productive, the notion of using agents to scale human productivity can be problematic.
Since agents are meant to improve a user's productivity, let's pretend for a moment that a particular company finds that employees are ten times as productive when they use agents. That would mean that a single employee is now able to do the work of ten employees. It also means that if that employee takes the day off, then it would have the same impact on productivity as if ten people had all taken the day off at the same time. So what happens when an employee decides to take a vacation?
Being that an employee taking time off now has such a tremendous negative impact on productivity, there are three ways that the situation might play out.
The first possibility is that the organization realizes how much productivity is being lost every time that a user takes a day off, and therefore either bans or strongly discourages employees from taking time off.
The second possibility is that the company allows employees to take time off, but forces them to continue managing their agents while on vacation (which isn't really a vacation at all).
The third possibility is that the employee takes time off, but the agents are given instructions ahead of time and are able to keep working in the employee's absence. At that point, the organization will likely begin to ask why they even need the human employee if agents can do the human's job. Job displacement would be the ultimate consequence.
It remains to be seen how any of this will play out in the real world and whether or not the idea of agent bosses will take hold. Regardless, concepts such as agent bosses and infinite workdays only benefit corporations, not their employees.
About the Author
Brien Posey is a 22-time Microsoft MVP with decades of IT experience. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Prior to going freelance, Posey was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and health care facilities. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the country's largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. In addition to his continued work in IT, Posey has spent the last several years actively training as a commercial scientist-astronaut candidate in preparation to fly on a mission to study polar mesospheric clouds from space. You can follow his spaceflight training on his Web site.