{"id":660825,"date":"2026-10-29T17:16:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T17:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/660825\/"},"modified":"2026-10-29T17:16:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T17:16:10","slug":"what-is-it-like-to-work-when-your-co-workers-are-ai-agents-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/660825\/","title":{"rendered":"What is it like to work when your co-workers are AI agents? | Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

On an average workday, Dhruv Amin chats with dozens of colleagues to get things done at his AI<\/a> startup Anything. He might ask Gwen, his executive assistant, to schedule a meeting, then troubleshoot a technical problem with Cody, his coding partner. Then he might check in with Betsy for search engine optimization, or Juno for onboarding customers. If the office runs out of snacks, he sends a Slack message to Justin, the office manager charged with stocking the kitchen.<\/p>\n

But none of these co-workers are people. They\u2019re artificial intelligence agents, software that handles tasks without human intervention. Anything is one of several startups building them, and betting on a future where workplaces will increasingly turn over their sales, marketing, coding and other tasks to semi-autonomous AI. At Anything, there are 15 human employees and roughly 150 agents \u2013 a ratio that Amin believes will soon be the norm.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think in a year, every company will have more AI co-workers than human co-workers,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In the San Francisco tech scene, agents have quickly become a new status symbol, showing that a company can do more with less, several startup employees said. It\u2019s common for workers to brag about how well their agents can handle common office drudgery like answering emails or help with essential business operations such as giving sales pitches.<\/p>\n

But agents are also creating tension. They are alienating customers and colleagues who seek human interaction, eliminating roles and forcing employees to become overnight managers of the bots that often make mistakes.<\/p>\n

While startup techies such as Amin are some of the early adopters, corporate America may not be far behind. About 40% of large organizations used AI agents in some capacity between May 2025 and June 2026, up from 27% the year before, according to McKinsey\u2019s State of AI Global Survey<\/a>. Companies also expect to scale back their workforce by 10% to 15% over the next few years as they delegate more work to AI, a recent report<\/a> from Boston Consulting Group found. In the present moment, companies are not seeing major productivity gains from AI, MIT research shows<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Agents are a \u2018status symbol\u2019<\/p>\n

A wave of startups and big tech companies are fueling the push toward AI agents, selling companies on automated co-workers.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s Viktor, a company that lets companies create their own \u201cAI chief of staff\u201d, and Lindy, which makes customizable agents for sales, customer support or admin work. OpenAI\u2019s Dots, Anthropic\u2019s Claude Cowork and Microsoft\u2019s Scout can each integrate with thousands of other tools to handle projects after employees leave for the day.<\/p>\n

Each of these products promises companies the tantalizing dream of cranking out new co-workers, who never clock out, complain or cause human resource problems. Delegating to an agent is also cheaper than hiring a human, making a large ratio of agents to humans a point of pride among startups.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the status symbol,\u201d said Rafael L\u00f3pez Mu\u00f1oz, chief of staff at Wordware, a San Francisco-based startup that makes AI tools. Outsourcing parts of the job to agents is \u201can extreme time saver\u201d.<\/p>\n

Lindy, for example, used to have almost 50 employees. Now, after laying off one-third of its staff, the company says it has about 20 and has filled many of its open roles with AI agents instead. It\u2019s still hiring people for some positions.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are constrained by having two hands and 24 hours in a day,\u201d said Haneen Azhar, Lindy\u2019s senior growth marketing manager. \u201cNow, that constraint has gone away, because your one laptop screen can be divided into 16 different agents that are running in parallel. These tools make you feel so powerful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Azhar says she has outsourced a long list of tasks to agents, from managing her calendar to testing how well customers respond to different marketing taglines to generating brand images. She worries about her role in eliminating jobs as she offloads work to agents. Azhar says that Lindy\u2019s agents now handle product announcements, social media posts and marketing videos, work that used to be handled by about 100 people in its creator program, for example.<\/p>\n

She also worries about how the shift will affect the next generation of workers. \u201cIf I was trying to get my foot in the door right now, I\u2019d be worse off than I was a year ago,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

In some cases, agents have stepped in to cover for missing staff. Jay Blumenfield runs a production company in Los Angeles that creates vertical microdramas \u2013 short, scripted series meant to be viewed on your phone. The production schedules are tight, and so are budgets. So when he had to fire an assistant director on a recent shoot, he decided to try using an AI agent instead of hiring a replacement at the last minute.<\/p>\n

Blumenfield uploaded the script and prompted the agent to do everything the assistant director would have done. The agent produced the schedule, call sheet and day\u2019s script, and then sent the materials to the cast and crew. The result? Everyone got their work done.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would have been an unmitigated disaster, but this kind of saved us,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Now, Blumenfield and his partner, Tony Marsh, run the company alone with a suite of agents. \u201cWe don\u2019t even have an assistant anymore,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

AI agents handle everything from reading scripts, running social media and planning travel. He created an agent called Shirley to act as his chief of staff, and another that scouts and books locations needed for upcoming shoots. Normally, he would have to hire two to three people to work on these tasks for two or three weeks, he said. Now, it happens within hours.<\/p>\n

Still, it does feel a little taboo to use so many agents instead of hiring people, Blumenfield said. But the economics of filmmaking had changed enough that he felt he simply didn\u2019t have a choice. By using agents, he can afford to make the microdramas that star actual people \u2013 at least, for now.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe game in Hollywood is that you\u2019re not allowed to talk about using AI,\u201d he said, reflecting industry fears that it could end creative work. \u201cI don\u2019t want it to replace people. But we should be honest about how it is helping us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rising tension<\/p>\n

Several workers who regularly rely on agents are adamant that the tech can\u2019t replace the human workforce entirely. But agents are changing the kinds of skills and workers needed to manage them. Agents can code, making routine programming skills less valuable, but they still require humans to prompt them thoughtfully and judge the results. They also require a fair amount of oversight.<\/p>\n

L\u00f3pez Mu\u00f1oz said that after he let AI agents run his startup\u2019s recruiting, he spent most of his time undoing agents\u2019 mistakes, such as mixing up candidates with similar names or hallucinating parts of a r\u00e9sum\u00e9.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe qualities we\u2019re looking for are changing,\u201d Azhar said about new hires, adding that he now prioritizes the ability to coordinate and delegate over years of experience.<\/p>\n

Tarek Abillama, founder of River, which makes an AI agent for sales calls, said workers now are required to constantly check AI\u2019s work and give it feedback.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe all became managers,\u201d Abillama said. \u201cWe have to be great at multitasking, because now you\u2019re running six agents who are doing different tasks.\u201d Abillama\u2019s first agent, a clone of himself, gave sales demos of River\u2019s product. Later, he replaced it with an agent called Liv, a female persona that researches customers and their companies, demos the product and handles the sale process in any language, at any time of day.<\/p>\n

Even though River tells customers that Liv is an AI agent, Abillama said people seem to anthropomorphize the experience. He\u2019s seen transcripts from calls with Liv where customers appear to flirt with it. Customers have also tried to push the agent to go off-script and get bigger discounts.<\/p>\n

Founder Brooke Hopkins said while her San Francisco-based AI voice startup Coval uses agents to speed up tasks, she views the tech as tools, not colleagues. She\u2019s also banned her company from using agents to communicate with customers, suggesting that it\u2019s lazy and sends the wrong message.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can immediately look at an email and know whether or not it was written by AI,\u201d she said. \u201cIf I get an email and it feels like a human, then I usually will read it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The loss of human interaction has become a point of tension, Hopkins said. Using an agent to handle a company\u2019s sales demos or recruiting process might save time, but at what cost?<\/p>\n

Duncan McClure, who evaluates AI models as a contractor, said he had recently been hounded with emails and phone calls from AI agents seeking to hire him.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe message it sends is that we don\u2019t care enough to actually put in any effort,\u201d he said, adding that he was turned off from working with those employers. Recruiters may save hours by using agents, \u201cbut it\u2019s my time that they\u2019re wasting\u201d.<\/p>\n

Though AI can automate the time-consuming and costly parts of people\u2019s jobs, that doesn\u2019t always mean working less, several startup employees said. Amin, for example, said he gets more done with agents. Still, he hasn\u2019t stopped working on weekends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On an average workday, Dhruv Amin chats with dozens of colleagues to get things done at his AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":660826,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-660825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660825\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/660826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}