Intro
Do you have management skills? When was the last time you took an employee from zero to hero — mentoring them, improving their skills, and helping them grow?
Traditional managers spend their days on sick leave, vacations, HR issues, performance problems, onboarding, team building, conflict resolution, coaching, mentoring, development, planning, strategy, execution, monitoring, evaluation, and reporting.
That era is ending. Management as a responsibility reserved for a small group of people is disappearing. Every employee will need to become a manager of a team of agents.
The new employee
We are seeing more colleagues and organizations create agents that can execute tasks and workflows, use tools, and access data. In the past two months a clearer pattern has emerged: these agents are no longer limited to a single skill or workflow. They are starting to act like employees. They live in Slack. They send daily briefs, surface open items, and flag future initiatives that need attention.
You need to manage them.
The realization hit me when I started using a Grok bot. I connected it to my skill repository and asked it to create other agents that would operate as a small company. It worked better than I expected. I worked with other agent product a few weeks earlier, individual agents produced solid outputs but failed to deliver strong collective results. With the Grok bot, we have dedicated chats for spesifc initiatives, and they are talking with etch other coloberation to deliver final assest that the team believes in.
They are the colleagues you always wanted to work with — talented, proactive, and capable.
The need for a manager
We still need managers. We just need to focus on the skills that actually matter.
The valuable managers are the ones who are not afraid to delegate — but only after they have clearly evaluated each agent and each task. The LLM models that the agents use keep changing. Tasks keep shifting. What remains constant is the need for judgment, critical thinking (PwC plans to certify workers in critical thinking as AI changes their jobs), and clear instructions: how to escalate, what the fallbacks are, and what the end goal looks like. Success must be measurable. KPIs have to align with the company’s OKRs.
Hidden unemployment takes on a new meaning: capable agents are ready to work, but their manager does not know what worthwhile work to give them.
Know your business at its core
Too often, managers focused on protecting their own departments from the rest of the organization. When one team became more efficient, other managers were left to absorb the consequences. Bottlenecks simply moved elsewhere.
That model no longer works. Every manager now needs to understand the business at its core — the real workflows, the actual chain of approvals, and where value is created or destroyed.
If the R&D manager builds a strong team of agents that can develop, test, and ship to production, it means little if the marketing manager lacks a capable GTM agent, or if sales is still working a pipeline built for a different product catalog. Every action has to stay aligned and create value for the organization. That alignment only comes from understanding how the company actually works. In my view culture, workflows, and approval processes will remain part of the job for at least the next few years.
You still own the outcome
With capable agents available, direction becomes the bottleneck.
Your agents can deliver strong individual results. Your job is to give them clear goals, a coherent vision, and a strategy. You need to know how to ask the right questions, what to prioritize, and how the market and the business actually work. Most importantly, you need TASTE: the ability to recognize whether the result in front of you is the one you actually want.
You decide what to ship. You remain responsible for whether it creates value. If the work misses the goal, you have to understand why and change direction.
Your ability to give agents worthwhile direction is becoming the main constraint.