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Microsoft has good news for anyone with corner office ambitions. In the future we’re all going to be bosses – of AI employees.
The tech company is predicting the rise of a new kind of business, called a “frontier firm”, where ultimately a human worker directs autonomous artificial intelligence agents to carry out tasks.
Everyone, according to Microsoft, will become an agent boss.
“As agents increasingly join the workforce, we’ll see the rise of the agent boss: someone who builds, delegates to and manages agents to amplify their impact and take control of their career in the age of AI,” wrote Jared Spataro, a Microsoft executive, in a blogpost this week. “From the boardroom to the frontline, every worker will need to think like the CEO of an agent-powered startup.”
Microsoft, a leading backer of the ChatGPT developer OpenAI, expects every organisation to be on their way to becoming a frontier firm within the next five years. It said these entities would be “markedly different” from those of today and would be structured around what Microsoft called “on-demand intelligence”, using AI agents to gain instant answers on queries related to an array of internal tasks from compiling sales data to drawing up finance projections.
The company said in its annual Work Trend Index report: “These companies scale rapidly, operate with agility, and generate value faster.”
It expects the emergence of the AI boss class to take place over three phases: first, every employee will have an AI assistant; then AI agents will join teams as “digital colleagues” taking on specific tasks; and finally humans will set directions for these agents, who go off on “business processes and workflows” with their bosses “checking in as needed”.
Microsoft said AI’s impact on knowledge work – a catch-all term for a range of professions from scientists to academics and lawyers – will go the same way as software development, by evolving from coding assistance to agents carrying out tasks.
Using the example of a worker’s role in a supply chain, Microsoft said agents could handle end-to-end logistics while humans guide the system and manage relationships with suppliers.
Microsoft has been pushing AI’s deployment in the workplace through autonomous AI agents, or tools that can carry out tasks without human intervention. Last year it announced that early adopters of Microsoft’s Copilot Studio product, which deploys bots, included the blue-chip consulting firm McKinsey, which is using agents to carry out tasks such as scheduling meetings with prospective clients.
AI’s impact on the modern workforce is one of the key economic and policy challenges produced by the technology’s rapid advance. While Microsoft says AI will remove “drudge” work and increase productivity – a measure of economic effectiveness – experts also believe it could result in widespread job losses.
This year the UK government-backed International AI Safety report said “many people could lose their current jobs” if AI agents become highly capable.
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The International Monetary Fund has estimated 60% of jobs in advanced economies such as the US and UK are exposed to AI, and half of these jobs may be negatively affected as a result.
The Tony Blair Institute, which supports widespread introduction of AI across the private and public sectors, has said AI could displace up to 3m private sector jobs in the UK. However, job losses will ultimately number in the low hundreds of thousands because the technology will also produce new jobs, the institute estimates.
Dr Andrew Rogoyski, a director at the Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI at the University of Surrey, said organisations that used AI agents would ultimately be tempted to employ fewer workers. “The temptation will be to use AI workers to displace human effort as companies strive to become more efficient, with lower operational costs,” he said.
“The danger of replacing humans with AI, apart from the socio-economic impact, is that we lose the knowledge in people’s heads that sustain companies, create innovative products and build meaningful relationships with customers and suppliers.”