The Future of Work: You’ll Manage People and AI Agents

I manage both people and AI agents now. My org chart is hybrid.

That sentence still sounds weird to say. But it’s been my reality for over a year, and I’m starting to see the same shift happening with my clients and workshop attendees.

The Hybrid Org Chart

Right now I have about a dozen AI agents running. A morning briefing agent. A meeting prep agent. An email drafter. A scheduling assistant. A content summarizer. Each one has a specific job, just like a person on a team would.

And the skill that makes me effective at managing these agents is the same skill that makes me effective at managing people: giving clear feedback and iterating.

If an agent isn’t performing well, I don’t throw it away. I adjust the prompt. Give it more context. Set clearer constraints. It’s the exact same feedback loop I’d use with a team member who’s delivering work that’s close but not quite right. “Here’s what I need differently. Here’s more context on why. Try again.”

The feedback loop is the same. The medium is different.

What’s Coming

Here’s what I told a room full of investors in January: the future of work is going to change in a way most people aren’t ready for.

Most of us grew up learning how to manage people. How to hire. How to delegate. How to give feedback in a way that motivates and course-corrects.

Soon you’ll need those same skills, but applied to a mix of humans and digital agents. Your team meeting might include three people and five agents. Your weekly review might cover what your marketing person accomplished AND what your AI content agent produced.

And some of you, probably sooner than you think, will manage a workforce that’s entirely digital. No human employees at all. Just you directing a team of agents.

A Full Team’s Worth of Hours

In a typical week, my agents save the equivalent of several full-time employees putting in a full week of work.

They cost a fraction of one person’s salary. They work 24/7. They don’t call in sick. They don’t need onboarding.

But here’s the thing that matters more than the numbers: what it does to your role.

When your agents handle the repetitive work, you stop being the person who does things. You become the person who reviews things. You stop writing the email. You start approving the email the agent drafted.

That shift from doing to reviewing changes the entire shape of your day. Suddenly you have time for the work that actually requires your judgment. Strategy. Relationships. Decisions that only you can make.

It’s Not About Replacing People

I want to be clear about something, because this conversation gets derailed fast. I’m not talking about firing your team and replacing them with bots.

The best version of this is when your people evolve into higher-value roles. I’ve seen this with teams I’ve worked with. Someone who used to spend most of their day on repetitive questions and routine requests. Once those get automated, they spend their time on the human side of the work: greeting people, building relationships, solving real problems.

Their role didn’t disappear. It got better. The AI took the boring parts. They kept the parts that actually need a human.

Same thing with operators I’ve worked with. They used to spend hours on first drafts of client-facing documents. Now an AI agent drafts them and they review. The time they save goes straight into conversations and the work they’re actually good at.

The New Core Skill

If managing a hybrid team of people and agents is the future, then there’s a new core skill that most people don’t have yet: prompting.

Not prompting in the “write me a poem” sense. Prompting as management. The ability to clearly articulate what you want, provide the right context, set constraints, and iterate on the output until it’s right.

It’s the same thing as being a good delegator. The people who are great at explaining tasks to their team will be great at prompting agents. The people who dump vague instructions on their team and wonder why the output is bad, they’ll have the same problem with AI.

The medium changes. The skill doesn’t.

Do This This Week

Pick one repetitive task you still do yourself. Scheduling. A first draft. A status recap. Write the brief you’d give a new hire, then run that workflow by hand once so you know the steps.

Then try one agent on just that task. Don’t rebuild your company. Use AI without adding busywork. If the output is close, give it the same feedback you’d give a person.

Put the review on your calendar the way you’d put a 1:1. If your week is already packed, keep the plan simple: one task, one agent, one review block.

Where to Start

If you’re managing people now and want to start building toward a hybrid team, here’s the simplest path:

1. Pick one repetitive task that someone on your team does every day. Scheduling. Data entry. Report formatting. Follow-up emails.
2. Build one agent to handle that task. Just one. Get it working reliably.
3. Let the person whose task you automated spend that freed-up time on something higher value. Something that requires judgment, creativity, or relationships.
4. Repeat. One agent at a time. One task at a time. One person evolving at a time.

Within a few months, your org chart starts looking different. Some boxes are people. Some boxes are agents. And you’re managing both.

That’s the future. It’s already here for some of us. The question is just timing.

If you want the flagship system for building that hybrid week, look at 25X.