Workers take on AI oversight as companies add managerial tasks without extra pay

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Workers take on AI oversight

Highlights

Boston Consulting Group's survey of nearly 12,000 employees shows 47% now manage or direct AI more than perform direct tasks, while 67% face more complex responsibilities as AI handles simpler work.
Visier survey data shows 54% of full-time U.S. employees report significant AI-driven role changes in the past two years, but only 17% of those received a promotion.
Kellogg School of Management research finds individual contributors embedded in AI agent oversight earn about 33% less on average than formal team leaders, highlighting a growing pay gap.

Agent supervision reshapes daily work

As first reported by Business Insider, companies are increasingly building workflows around the idea that human employees oversee AI agents rather than perform every task directly. That model is appearing in software, marketing, education, and consulting, where workers set instructions, review results, correct mistakes, and remain responsible for the final output.

Salesforce earlier this month unveiled what it called job-ready agents for sales, customer service, e-commerce, and internal operations, while Wipro says AI-driven productivity gains are equivalent to 20,000 workers. At Daytona, a 30-person AI startup, CEO Ivan Burazin recently told Business Insider that each of the company's 16 engineers manages an average of five AI agents, and that no one writes code anymore.

Software and AI engineer Sinda Khenine says agents let her produce far more code and build a business on her own, but they also shift her time away from engineering and toward coordination. She says the work now involves choosing models, supplying context, setting boundaries, reviewing output, and deciding whether systems need to be rerun or stopped.

Other professionals describe a similar change. Freelance technical writer and backend developer Mari Nnanna estimates that 20% to 30% of her working time now goes to managing agents, while product marketing consultant Patricia Diaz-Hymes says she spends about 30% of her time supervising AI and building systems that encode her judgment into those tools.

An American professor at a university in China, who asked not to be named, says she is being told to teach students to use AI, prevent them from misusing it for assignments, and explain ethical use without clear guidance on what that means. Her account illustrates how AI oversight duties are also spreading into roles where workers say they have limited training or little confidence in the technology itself.

Pay and training lag behind the shift

Data cited in the article suggests the managerial burden is growing faster than formal recognition. In a global survey of nearly 12,000 employees by Boston Consulting Group, 47% say they spend more time managing and directing AI than doing the work themselves, while 67% say AI has taken over simpler tasks and left them with more complex responsibilities.

David Martin, leader of the People & Organization practice at BCG and a coauthor of the report, says the change is especially visible among software engineers and marketers, who now have to direct agents, judge their work, and own the outcome. The same survey finds that 72% of respondents say AI has considerably changed the skills expected of them, but only 36% believe they have received adequate upskilling.

Recognition and compensation are not keeping pace either. According to data from an upcoming Visier survey cited in the article, 54% of full-time U.S. employees surveyed say their roles or careers have significantly changed due to AI in the past two years, but only 17% of those whose roles changed have been promoted.

Andrea Derler, a principal researcher at Visier, says individual contributors are increasingly performing managerial activity without the formal status normally attached to management roles. Prior research from the Kellogg School of Management based on Visier data found that individual contributors earn about 33% less on average than team leaders at the same firm, highlighting a potential pay gap as agent oversight becomes embedded in ordinary jobs.

Maria Colacurcio, CEO of compensation software company Syndio, says she is seeing more workers take on what she calls management light responsibilities for AI agents. She expects any eventual reward for that work to come more through bonuses and incentives than through higher base pay, although she argues companies should train for and compensate the skill more directly.

In our earlier coverage of the AI-driven rally in Asian equities, we highlighted how renewed investor enthusiasm for artificial intelligence pushed regional technology shares higher, led by Taiwan’s Taiex reaching a record intraday level. We noted that the move reflected broad demand for AI-linked stocks and underscored Taiwan’s outsized importance in global semiconductor supply chains, as chip exposure continues to steer the island’s benchmark.

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