In the companies of the future, everyone may be a boss…of sorts.
Microsoft and LinkedIn’s annual Work Trends Index envisions a new type of org chart in which each human employee oversees a team of AI agents—AI systems that go beyond chatbots to perform actions. That’s how frontier firms—the report’s term for companies on the leading edge of AI adoption—will operate, with agent bosses (pretty much all human workers) shepherding their task-specific AI underlings.
The report authors derived concepts like these from a survey of 31,000 knowledge workers in 31 countries, trends from LinkedIn labor market and Microsoft software data, and a host of expert interviews.
From that research, they gleaned that workers of all kinds tend to be overburdened; four in five said they lacked the time or energy to complete all their work. Yet a little over half of leaders said they need more productivity. Cue the new agent employees: 82% of bosses said they expect AI agents to fill this capacity gap, according to Microsoft. (Yes, Microsoft’s report does contain a glossary of its new terms.)
The findings come as Microsoft and other big enterprise companies are pitching companies on agents as the next big era of AI in the workplace.
On the frontier: Alexia Cambon, senior director of research at Microsoft, said the team identified around 800 of the 31,000 workers as currently working for a frontier firm. Many of them were in the tech industry, or in professional and financial services.
“I do think those are the industries that are having to reinvent themselves much more quickly,” Cambon said.
The report said “we expect that every organization will be on their journey to becoming” a frontier firm within the next two to five years.
“The pace is crazy,” Cambon said. “I’ve never experienced something in my career as a researcher, in terms of how quickly both these technologies are evolving, but also how quickly people are adopting them.”
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Supervision needed: Cambon said agents need close human supervision, and the report suggests that each firm will need to identify an optimal ratio of agent boss humans to AI reports, depending on the tasks and roles. But will this system ultimately result in fewer human employees? A third of leaders admitted they were considering headcount reductions in the next 12 to 18 months, the report said.
Cambon noted, however, that agents will create more jobs than they eliminate, especially in supervision roles.
“History teaches us that there’s no tech innovation that has lost more jobs than it has created,” Cambon said. “All of this work to do with agents is work. If you think about what agentic oversight is, if you think about, how do we build agents, if you think about if we’re going to have to recruit and train agents…all of that is net new work that doesn’t live anywhere right now.”
Capital vs. labor: Microsoft and Salesforce have taken to describing agents as “digital labor.” But for all their friendly personas, agents are really just AI-infused software programs, at the end of the day. Cambon said survey respondents were “split down the middle” in whether they saw AI as a coworker or a tool, but the former concept can help get more out of agents.
“If you think about it as another Excel spreadsheet, which is what a tool is, you’re thinking about it as a command-based technology…something that’s just there to do your bidding,” Cambon said. “If you think about it as a thought partner or a team member or a new type of labor, you have a different relationship with it. It’s conversation-based. It is much more iterative.”