Of Leaders, Workers and Too Many AI Agents
I keep seeing a version of this with the companies I advise: the leadership team comes back from a conference (or a vendor demo) fired up about AI agents, a few months later there are agents for everything, and when you go and sit with the people actually doing the work, the mood is… let’s say more reserved. So I wasn’t surprised when a new Asana report , covered by CIO Dive this week, put some…
A new Asana report reveals a significant divide between how leaders and workers experience AI agents in the workplace. The survey of over 4,500 CIOs, AI leaders, and workers in the US and UK found that leaders utilize three or more agents each week, while only 36% of workers feel agents can handle their most critical tasks. Nearly half of the workers using agents report spending about 10% of their working time managing agents, which translates to half a day a week.
Additionally, 38% of workers say that more than a quarter of the agents' work is duplicated or overlaps.
The discrepancy in perception arises from the nature of tasks each group handles. Leaders delegate tasks that are straightforward for agents, such as summarizing threads, drafting emails, and preparing board deck numbers. However, workers require assistance with complex tasks that involve context from various systems and past experiences, which agents struggle to grasp. Consequently, workers are more cautious about the effectiveness of agents, recognizing the potential for errors when agents lack context.
Asana's chief product officer, Arnab Bose, emphasizes that CIOs should shift their focus from measuring agent activity to evaluating the actual completion of work. Instead of tracking metrics like the number of prompts, active users, or agent runs, it's crucial to measure whether the work is genuinely accomplished. This change in perspective is supported by Calendrz's AI scheduling assistant, which initially functioned without a user interface, relying solely on an audit log to track outcomes.
To address the issue of overusing agents, leadership teams should prioritize reducing the number of agents and selecting those with contextual understanding. By measuring the finished work, including task completion, time to resolve, and error rates, teams can identify which agents add value and which cause duplication or overlap. Involving workers in the decision-making process and measuring the actual impact of agents on work completion will help bridge the gap between leaders and workers.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
