AI Agents Are About to Flood the Workforce. No One’s Ready for It

In the coming months, hundreds of thousands of brand-new coworkers will be entering the workforce. You’ll learn their names and recognize their profile pictures. They’ll get added to your email chains and Slack channels. They’ll become chiefs of staff, engineers, and marketing gurus.

But these coworkers aren’t human: They are all artificial intelligence agents.

The rise of AI agents—systems, based on large language models, designed to complete tasks autonomously—has launched a tsunami of companies selling the services of digital employees. These agents are supposed to be the perfect worker bees: available 24/7, never complaining, and providing superhuman intelligence.

Yet there has been curiously little discussion of what these agents are like as actual coworkers. Julie Bedard, a Boston Consulting Group partner, noticed the murky nature of how people talked about AI at work three years ago, as rapid adoption of ChatGPT convinced executives the technology could bring exponential improvements in productivity.

“People didn't have language for it,” Bedard tells WIRED. “Is it a tool? Is it a teammate?
Is it a colleague? Is it a coworker?”

When platforms such as Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini for Workspace launched in 2023, they were marketed primarily as tools for employees. But in January, when Bedard and colleagues polled 1,261 managers, 22 percent said their organizations had added AI agents to corporate org charts. Bedard said that this percentage is likely to grow as dozens of startups offer up the services of AI employees and big tech companies hype their autonomous agents. In June, for example, Microsoft launched “Scout,” an agent built to complete tasks like rescheduling meetings and drafting emails.