Analysis – AI Agents as Employees (syntheticauth.ai)

In October 2025, Sandy Carter’s 57‑page survey "AI Agents As Employees" argued that enterprises are shifting from treating AI as a tool to treating autonomous agents as teammates, reshaping org charts, governance and the “social contract” between humans and machines. It compiles case studies (JPMorgan, Shopify, PayPal, Unstoppable Domains) and vendor capabilities (Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM), and promotes governance bodies, human‑in‑the‑loop workflows, and identity/role frameworks as the path to safe agent adoption. The analysis here accepts the survey’s breadth but flags major contradictions that should reshape how practitioners act on its recommendations. Technically and operationally the paper overclaims. Explainability is conflated with workflow traceability: LIME and vendor XAI give feature attributions or API call logs, not causal reasons for outputs from closed‑source LLMs (GPT‑4, Claude). Identity management is underexplored—even crypto‑wallet‑enabled agents that can buy data lack spending limits or fraud controls. The “teammate” and “social contract” metaphors break down when organizations must verify outputs (robust human review) and agents lack reciprocal agency or emotional grounding. Legal and governance gaps persist: deploying organizations are already being held liable (e.g., Air Canada case), while red‑teaming and audits often amount to governance theater without solving attribution in complex failures. Bottom line: current agents are powerful, narrow automations that demand concrete explainability, identity controls and realistic governance before being treated as employees or true collaborators.