ELUXR

The Rise of the Agent Manager

If 2025 is the year of agents, then 2026 will surely belong to agent managers. Agent managers are people who can manage teams of AI agents. How many can one person successfully manage? I can barely manage 4 AI agents at once. They ask for clarification, request permission, issue web searches—all requiring my attention. Sometimes a task takes 30 seconds. Other times, 30 minutes. I lose track of which agent is doing what & half the work gets thrown away because they misinterpret instructions.

This isn’t a skill problem. It’s a tooling problem. Physical robots offer clues about robots manager productivity. MIT published an analysis in 2020 that suggested the average robot replaced 3.3 human jobs. In 2024, Amazon reported pickpack and ship robots replaced 24 workers.

But there’s a critical difference: AI is non-deterministic. AI agents interpret instructions. They improvise. They occasionally ignore directions entirely. A Roomba can only dream of the creative freedom to ignore your living room & decide the garage needs attention instead.

Management Theory and AI Agents

Management theory often guides teams to a span of control of 7 people. Speaking with some better agent managers, I’ve learned they use an agent inbox, a project management tool for requesting AI work & evaluating it. In software engineering, Github’s pull requests or Linear tickets serve this purpose.

Very productive AI software engineers manage 10-15 agents by specifying 10-15 tasks in detail, sending them to an AI, waiting until completion & then reviewing the work. Half of the work is thrown away, & restarted with an improved prompt.

The agent inbox isn’t popular – yet. It’s not broadly available. But I suspect it will become an essential part of the productivity stack for future agent managers because it’s the only way to keep track of the work that can come in at any time.

The Future of Agent Management

If ARR per employee is the new vanity metric for startups, then agents managed per person may become the vanity productivity metric of a worker. In 12 months, how many agents do you think you could manage? 10? 50? 100? Could you manage an agent that manages other agents?

Potential Business Benefits

As agent management evolves, it may yield significant benefits for businesses:

• Increased Efficiency: With effective management tools, businesses can expect faster completion of tasks.
• Cost Savings: Reduced labor costs as a portion of tasks traditionally handled by humans are delegated to AI agents.
• Scalability: As demand grows, so too can teams of AI agents, without the traditional constraints of human resources.

Examples of ROI

To quantify the average benefits:

1. A business employing 10 AI agents could see a 50% reduction in task completion time, resulting in significant labor cost savings over a year.
2. If an AI agent takes over repetitive tasks, it could save upwards of $10,000 per worker annually, allowing them to focus on higher-value activities.
3. With better project management tools, lost tasks due to miscommunication could be reduced by 30%, further enhancing productivity.

Actions for Implementation

To fully capitalize on agent management, businesses should:

• Invest in Training: Equip team members with skills in AI management and prompt engineering.
• Adopt Project Management Tools: Implement an agent inbox or similar tools to streamline task assignment and oversight.
• Monitor and Adjust: Regularly assess agent performance and refine tools and processes to maximize productivity.

Conclusion

The rise of the agent manager marks a shift in how we approach productivity in a world increasingly driven by AI. By embracing these concepts and tools, businesses can redefine their workflows and achieve remarkable efficiencies.

Ready to explore how agent management can transform your business? Schedule a consultation with our team today!

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