Will I Manage Agents as I Would Employees?
AI agents are joining our teams. But will we manage them like employees? Here’s my take from the edge of strategy, automation, and organisational design.
As businesses rapidly integrate digital agents, powered by AI, GPTs, and automated systems, leaders are grappling with new questions: Can these digital agents simply slot into our existing organisational structures, or do they require entirely new management approaches?
A New Type of Workforce
I'm not a Corporate Enterprise. I'm not leading thousands of employees. I'm an entrepreneur, a digital strategist, experimenting with digital agents daily.
And here's what I see clearly: digital agents are increasingly acting like team members rather than mere tools.
For instance, I use GPT-based agents to write, analyse, summarise meetings, and organise tasks. They're reliable, available around the clock, and relentlessly consistent. But does that mean I manage them like employees?
It makes them/us redundant, it changes the work and it creates new work.
I only see the latter happening moderately so there is still a lot of change (and unrest) waiting for us. To be continued.
Managing Similarities: Clear Tasks, Clear Results
Like human team members, digital agents need clear tasks and expectations. Ambiguity isn't good for AI, just as it isn't good for people. Defining clear objectives, KPIs, and tasks helps digital agents excel, much as it helps human employees thrive.
Where Management Differs: Motivation and Learning
Yet, there are critical differences. Digital agents don't need motivation or morale boosting. They don't seek growth opportunities or emotional support. However, they require careful and continuous training, often supervised, to ensure accuracy, fairness, and relevance.
Unlike humans, agents don't naturally learn from experience. They must be explicitly trained, retrained, and guided.
Organisational Shifts
Consider Moderna’s recent shift, merging HR and Tech departments. This move signals a profound realignment around the combined value of humans and digital agents.
Isabelle Bousquette
Professor Venkat Venkatraman calls this the shift into the "agentic era"—organisations designed around the combined strength of biological and digital agents.
My Perspective
From my position, managing agents feels less like traditional management and more like orchestration. It's about clearly defining roles, ensuring seamless integration between humans and AI, and continually refining processes.
Digital agents won't replace management, they will redefine it. Leaders will become architects of hybrid teams, curators of collaborative ecosystems, and continuous optimisers of workflows.
Looking Forward
As more businesses adopt digital agents, these distinctions will become central. Managing digital agents effectively means understanding their unique needs and integrating them into an agile, adaptive organisational structure.
Will we manage digital agents exactly like human employees? Probably not. But we'll certainly manage them with equal care, strategic clarity, and deliberate intent.
After all, agents, may they be human or digital, work best when given clear purpose, clear tasks, and clear boundaries. And that's something every good manager already knows.