AI agents are giving rank-and-file workers a manager's job at their old pay

Daytona's chief executive, Ivan Burazin, told Business Insider that his engineers oversee about five agents each on average. Across 16 engineers, that comes to roughly 80 agents ^[8][1]. The company has 30 people in all ^[8].

Sinda Khenine, a software and AI engineer at Electrolux, described what that oversight involves ^[11]. She picks the models, gives them context and rules, checks their work and assembles the output of several agents into a finished product ^[11]. "The effort is more focused on the coordination itself rather than the engineering problem that we are solving in the first place," she told Business Insider ^[13]. Khenine also manages people at Electrolux. She said overseeing agents can be even more demanding, because they need extensive setup and continued attention once they start working ^[12]. "It's like a loop," she said. "You need to monitor the results, you need to see the progress. You need to decide if you need to rerun or finish the job." ^[14]

The strongest objection to the unpaid-manager reading comes from Khenine herself. She said agents helped her write more code and build a company on her own, something she said would have been "10 times harder" before ^[10]. That gain is clearest in the AI business she is starting for herself, where the extra output belongs to her ^[10]. Inside an employer, the firm counts the output. Wipro's chief technology officer, Sandhya Arun, told Business Insider that AI has added the productivity equivalent of 20,000 workers ^[6].

The pay side of the argument has thinner evidence behind it. Entrepreneur's summary says the new duties come without a promotion or a raise ^[1]. Business Insider reports that employees are under pressure to use the tools and now spend less time on the work of their professions ^[2]. The reporting does not include salary figures, leveling data or attrition rates. Named people describe the change in duties first-hand. The pay gap is a general characterisation, and nothing in the record links it to people quitting. I think this belongs in this year's leveling cycle. The evidence does not support treating it as a retention emergency this week.

For leaders, the trade-off is payroll cost against a job description that matches the work. Whatever goes into this year's job descriptions decides what next year's performance reviews measure. Counting agent supervision as management raises the pay base. It also means drawing a line on when overseeing about five agents, as Daytona's engineers do, makes someone a manager ^[8]. Leaving it out keeps costs flat. The reviews then go on scoring hands-on craft, the part of the job Khenine now spends less time on ^[11].