You entered your profession because you wanted to teach, code, write, create, or design. But thanks to AI — and the immense pressure to use it — you now spend less time practicing your craft and more time managing the technology that’s doing the work you wanted to do.
For many professionals, that means supervising agents: tools designed to perform tasks autonomously but that, in practice, require workers to set expectations, delegate assignments, evaluate performance, demand revisions, and intervene when things go wrong. Others manage a steady pipeline of AI-generated work, reviewing the output and taking responsibility for what ultimately ships.
Congratulations, you’re now a manager — just without the title or the salary increase.
The notion that AI will make everyone a manager has been discussed for some time, and companies are now structuring their operations around that assumption.
Earlier this month Salesforce introduced “job‑ready agents,” AI tools built to handle sales, customer service, e‑commerce and internal operations, while providing human staff with capabilities to train those agents about their firms, coordinate them and boost their performance.
At the same time, Wipro — an Indian IT services firm — has boosted productivity via AI by the equivalent of 20,000 workers, according to CTO Sandhya Arun, who imagines “the same engineer managing a bunch of agents.”
At Daytona, a 30‑person AI startup, each of its 16 engineers oversees roughly five AI agents, CEO Ivan Burazin told Themoneytimes. He’s reached the stage where the company says no one there writes code any longer.
For some employees, managing a digital workforce is now a novel perk. I’m not being displaced by AI; I’m ruling over it. Yet many others never wanted to become the boss of bots — especially software engineers who chose the principal or staff track for career growth without supervisory duties, only to end up managing machines de facto.
Sinda Khenine entered software engineering to create things, but now, as a software and AI engineer at appliance maker Electrolux while also launching her own AI venture, she spends much of her time overseeing the systems that build.
Agents have enabled Khenine to generate far more code and launch her own company — a task she says would have been “10 times harder” before. She now spends less time on the hands‑on engineering that originally attracted her and instead selects models, provides context, defines limits, reviews results and guides multiple agents to produce a finished product.
“The focus is now on coordination rather than the engineering problem we’re solving,” Khenine notes.
Khenine, who also heads a human team at Electrolux, says managing agents can be more complex than managing people; they demand extensive setup and continuous oversight even after they start operating.
“It’s a loop,” she explains. “You must monitor the results, track progress, and decide whether to rerun or complete the job.”
Khenine views this managerial aspect as part of a software engineer’s role today and doesn’t think it warrants a raise, yet she observes that those outside the AI field may underestimate the labor involved in orchestrating agents.
Freelance technical writer and backend developer Mari Nnanna estimates she now devotes 20% to 30% of her work time to managing agents.
“It’s suddenly become a skill I need to master,” Nnanna says.
Agents can speed her work, especially by searching documentation or clarifying unfamiliar material, but they require considerable handholding; otherwise you risk making many mistakes.
Although Nnanna would rather stay an individual contributor, supervising AI has become part of her job — and is unavoidable when she uses it if she wants to maintain accuracy.
The shift isn’t limited to technologists.
Product marketing consultant Patricia Diaz‑Hymes estimates she now spends about 30% of her time supervising AI.
“It feels like management,” she says. “I give my agents names, set their configurations, and talk to them in a very human way.”
I’m trying to keep my judgment from residing only in my head and instead let it reside partially in my agents,