The Rise of the Agent Manager

If 2025 is the year of agents, then 2026 will surely belong to agent managers.

Agent managers are people who can manage teams of AI agents. How many can one person successfully manage?

I can barely manage 4 AI agents at once. They ask for clarification, request permission, issue web searches—all requiring my attention. Sometimes a task takes 30 seconds. Other times, 30 minutes. I lose track of which agent is doing what & half the work gets thrown away because they misinterpret instructions.

This isn’t a skill problem. It’s a tooling problem.

Physical robots offer clues about robots manager productivity. MIT published an analysis in 2020 that suggested the average robot replaced 3.3 human jobs. In 2024, Amazon reported pickpack and ship robots replaced 24 workers.

But there’s a critical difference : AI is non-deterministic. AI agents interpret instructions. They improvise. They occasionally ignore directions entirely. A Roomba can only dream of the creative freedom to ignore your living room & decide the garage needs attention instead.

Management theory often guides teams to a span of control of 7 people.

Speaking with some better agent managers, I’ve learned they use an agent inbox, a project management tool for requesting AI work & evaluating it. In software engineering, Github’s pull requests or Linear tickets serve this purpose.

Very productive AI software engineers manage 10-15 agents by specifying 10-15 tasks in detail, sending them to an AI, waiting until completion & then reviewing the work. Half of the work is thrown away, & restarted with an improved prompt.

The agent inbox isn’t popular - yet. It’s not broadly available.

But I suspect it will become an essential part of the productivity stack for future agent managers because it’s the only way to keep track of the work that can come in at any time.

If ARR per employee is the new vanity metric for startups, then agents managed per person may become the vanity productivity metric of a worker.

In 12 months, how many agents do you think you could manage? 10? 50? 100? Could you manage an agent that manages other agents?