Managers managing managers is out. Managers managing AI agents is in. (www.businessinsider.com)

Companies are increasingly creating a new role — the “agent manager” — to supervise fleets of autonomous AI agents that plan, execute and iterate on tasks with minimal human prompting. Firms racing to deploy agents say these systems can speed workflows and replace some human roles: Vercel trained an agent on its top sales performer and cut a 10-person sales team down to one human rep plus agent-assisted staff. Industry voices predict new hiring and compensation patterns (one founder floated a $200K AI-SDR manager) as organizations reconfigure middle management around technical orchestration rather than people supervision. Technically, agent management emphasizes different skills: defining the “North Star” objective, decomposing tasks for agents, building intentional workflows, training and fine-tuning agents, reviewing agent behavior, and implementing guardrails (e.g., requiring human sign-off before sensitive actions). That shifts hiring from classic managerial experience toward technical fluency in prompts, tooling, evaluation metrics, and automation design — work companies like PwC expect to upskill internally. The change signals a broader organizational shift: not simply fewer managers, but a new modality where human supervisors act as orchestrators of autonomous software teammates, balancing productivity gains with oversight and safety.