Are the agents coming for your job?

Hello and welcome to Working It.

Best news of the week? A new workplace comedy series is coming in September, from The Office co-creator Greg Daniels. Even better (for me, anyway), The Paper is, yes, set in a newspaper 🗞️. The set-up is that the documentary team who filmed at Dunder Mifflin are now with The Truth Teller, a local paper in Toledo, Ohio. Oscar from The Office (Oscar Nunez) is one crossover character already announced.

Read on for some answers to the burning questions of the moment: what even are AI agents — and are they coming for my job? And in Office Therapy, I suggest tactics to survive in a corporate culture upended by a new boss 👩🏽‍💻.

Ready to manage your new human/AI hybrid team?

The concept of “AI agents” as major workplace disrupters first gained wide traction late last year, when Salesforce co-founder and chief executive Marc Benioff said that “we are really at the edge of a revolutionary transformation” using digital labour. At the time, a lot of us went 🤷‍♀️. How things change in just a few months.

These agents have embedded so fast, in fact, that Steven Bartlett’s blockbuster The Diary of a CEO podcast this week was dedicated to an “emergency” debate on AI agents, suggesting that 50 per cent of the global workforce is under threat. I am going to watch the whole thing: set aside two and a half hours, though 👀.

On the more optimistic side, Benioff talked to the FT in a wide-ranging interview published today. In response to reporter Stephen Morris’s questions about job losses and upheaval, he said: “I would say that it is important to realise that, when new technologies appear, there can be changes in the workforce. And this one is no different, especially when we talk about the emergence of digital labour: you could have fundamental productivity increases in GDP without adding more people. That hasn’t happened too many times in history, so that’s very exciting.”

Agentic AI rollout is going much faster 🏃🏻‍♂️ than many people’s developing understanding of it; although it seems workers may be ahead of leaders on this point. A McKinsey report published this year found that “business leaders underestimate how extensively their employees are using GenAI. C-suite leaders estimate that only 4 per cent of employees use GenAI for at least 30 per cent of their daily work, when in fact that percentage is three times greater.” If that’s true of GenAI, perhaps the same will be true of agentic AI?

It helps me, amid this confusion, to try to define what workplace agents do. Correct me if you think I am wrong, but my take is that agents can handle multiple steps in a process or workflow. Or, alternatively, think of an agent like a wind-up toy 🚂 (bear with me): you set it up with access to multiple platforms and processes, give it a task, and off it runs and carries on until it’s completed. Contrast this with what I now think of as “trad” GenAI, where you ask ChatGPT or Claude (etc) a question and it responds. End of.

Examples of agents’ work include approving expenses, onboarding workers and clients, and collaborating on project ideas. The FT’s Cristina Criddle tested some publicly available agentic AI tools for common work tasks.

Where are we heading with agentic AI, short term? From what I am hearing and reading, I think the conversation we are all tired of having about hybrid work and its benefits (or not, blah blah 🥱) will be replaced within months by a different hybrid discussion: the human/agentic team. We touched on this recently in this newsletter and suggested that the traditional org chart might be replaced by a human/AI mix of staff, often doing a quite different mix of roles. Salesforce (again) has some interesting research on HR chiefs’ views on agentic AI: 80 per cent of them think that “within five years, most workforces will have humans and AI agents/digital labour working together.”

No word on how many jobs HR chiefs think will be lost, but they do expect 61 per cent of staff to remain in current roles, and those surveyed anticipate “a 19 per cent reduction in labour costs — the equivalent to $11,064 per employee” (based on OECD average wages) 🧐.

And what about the future? It may be useful to look at how new companies are being set up. They don’t have legacy staff so they can do what they want. And some of these start-ups are very, very lean. So-called “AI-native” companies have very small numbers of staff, are built around AI, and their org charts are, according to a Bloomberg report, “fluid”.

Got a better take on agents? Are you a jobs doomer or an optimist? Email me: [email protected].

Office Therapy

The problem: I have a good, stable job in a town where those are scarce. A new external person has come from global HQ to head our branch. New boss is micromanaging, isn’t listening to the experts, and keeps having consultant-type meetings (he used to be one) to “vision” how things might change. We are all stressed and angry. Older colleagues are talking about early retirement. I can’t afford to leave. How can I get through?

Isabel’s advice: I keep meeting people who have had a similar experience, across different sectors. The wider context is that many workplaces are changing, very quickly, and sometimes leaders are almost in a “panic” over AI. Jobs will go, jobs will change. That’s the big picture, and your once-stable workplace may never be the same again. (It will settle down, but the workplace culture will be different.)

We all get upset and angry at pointless change. And this boss will change things, if only to feed his own sense of purpose and importance (this has always happened, big egos are a given in business). In your case, though, HQ sent this ex-consultant into your branch office, so there may also be a wider plan.

Your task now, should you choose to accept it 🕵🏻‍♀️, is to rise above what’s going on and view it as if from “on high”. Do your work, make yourself someone the boss wants to talk to and have in the “vision” meetings; then you will be in a position to try to find out more. What is the plan from HQ, and can you use that information to secure your own job?

You may need to go for lots of short walks and take deep breaths in the bathroom to stop yourself from freaking out 🤯 or getting too down. You will feel grief as well as anger — and this is indeed grief, for an office culture that was valuable, and may now be lost. But don’t get too bogged down in the angry gossip: listen, don’t absorb. All this will pass 🌅.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Why you should cheat on your boss: So-called polygamous working has hit the headlines, a phrase describing the remote workers who are doing more than one job without telling either employer. Emma Jacobs investigates.

2. OpenAI chief Sam Altman: ‘This is genius-level intelligence:’ Lunch with the FT is always a great read, and this is no exception, but a bonus in this interview is that Sam Altman cooks lunch for FT editor Roula Khalaf in his own kitchen.

3. The minimum wage is now coming for white-collar jobs: The UK minimum wage of £12.21 an hour is worth about £22,000-£25,500 for a full-time job, depending on hours worked. That’s getting close, Sarah O’Connor reports, to the bottom rung salaries in some white collar sectors such as IT and marketing.

4. Is the UK failing its graduates? Sobering statistics from Delphine Strauss and Amy Borrett about the graduate job market. The value of a degree is still visible in lifetime earnings — as much as £1mn for medicine — but there are huge variations.

5. Microsoft to axe 3 per cent of workers in latest round of job cuts: The company didn’t confirm whether the cuts were driven by AI-led efficiencies, the FT’s Rafe Uddin reports, but it has said previously it wants to streamline middle management.

One more thing . . . 

The New York Times has a beautiful interactive piece offering “the best advice I’ve ever heard for how to be happy” compiled from Jancee Dunn’s many interviews for the paper. My favourite comes from Jamil Zaki, of Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, who suggests we “spread positive titbits about someone. Maybe it’s a little-known but admirable fact about that person, he said, or a kind act you catch them in.” Even better, “research suggests that spreading ‘positive gossip’ may encourage others to do it too.” Let’s all try this at work 💕. I’ll report back.

A view from the Working It community 📷

I am loving the photos taken from readers’ desks or rooftops and aim to publish them all. This week’s balcony-view comes from Emily Griffiths, a senior manager at the British Business Bank in Sheffield. She writes:

“Even though much of the city centre had to be rebuilt after world war two, floor six of our 1920s bank, ‘Steel City House’, is still higher than most other buildings in Sheffield city centre.”

Emily will receive a “lucky dip” of the new Working It-adjacent management and life improvement books from the piles on my desk 🏆.

Please send your office view (or soothing photos of your dogs, cats and other furry co-workers) to: [email protected]