Management in the age of AI
Handing work to an AI agent brings back an old question from economics, the principal–agent problem. When someone delegates, the interests of the two sides can drift apart, and the one who delegates pays to brief, to monitor and to check the result (Jensen and Meckling, 1976). With software agents the same choices return in a new form: what to delegate, how to brief, how much autonomy to grant, how to verify, and who answers for the outcome.
And it raises the bar for everyone. Suddenly all individual contributors (ICs) find themselves in the driver’s seat, and topics like hybrid workforces, goal alignment and information asymmetry are everywhere. Here are some of my thoughts on this space, in the essays below.
Writing
- The only road there ever was?
Coping with the LLM Multiverse
- For 20 years, advantage was a question of who you hired
The edge is moving from who you hired to how your team uses the model.
- Agent guidance reads like a CEO's messaging to their org
Guiding agents looks like leading an org. We are all managers now.
- We're living in a new age of sense of agency
AI made us all managers: we lose some flow, but we gain more agency.