Back in 2023, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made an observation about his company:
“I don’t think you want a management structure that’s just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work,” he said during a company Q&A session, The Verge reported at the time.
Then came the great flattening. Companies from Meta to Citi began to cull their ranks of middle managers.
Now, the AI age is offering a new twist to the story of middle management.
“I think you’re just going to see a different modality within a company, which is an agent manager,” Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, the chief operating officer at Vercel, told Business Insider.
Agents have become one of the central innovations of 2025. They’re commonly defined as virtual assistants that can complete tasks autonomously. They break down problems, outline plans, and take action without being prompted by a user.
Companies are racing to implement them to help them work faster. Vercel, a $9.3 billion cloud-based developer platform founded in 2015, recently trained an AI agent on its best-performing sales representative. The machine is so effective that the company downsized its 10-person sales team to a single top performer and moved the remaining nine to a different team.
Managing a team of agents requires different skills from managing a team of people.
“You have to understand where you want to go, what the North Star is, what excellence looks like, and be able to explain that to someone,” Grosser said about managing people. It’s a job that typically requires years of experience and a healthy dose of tact.
Becoming an AI agent manager might have a lower barrier to entry, though it requires different technical skills.
“The future is you might graduate from college and you’re a manager now,” she said. “We’re all going to have to learn to delegate, to break down tasks, etcetera, to produce the type of output that you want from your agent teammate.”
Grosser didn’t say whether Vercel will be posting a job like this anytime soon, but said it’s something the company is “contemplating.”
Last month, Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr.com, an online community for founders of SaaS and B2B companies, posted on LinkedIn that the first $200,000 sales development representative role is “coming.”
The job involves managing “10+ AI SDR agents” and requires a candidate to be “pretty technical,” he wrote.
Saurabh Sarbaliya, the chief technology officer and AI lead at PwC, told Business Insider that companies will likely try to train their existing workforce to take on this kind of role before recruiting external candidates.
“I need our existing workforce to be able to become agent managers,” he said. “We need to be able to actually go and up-skill our people on how to actually go and become good agent managers,” he said.
Good agent managers should be able to train agents, give them context, review their behavior, and design workflows that are very “intentional,” he said. That includes requiring an agent to consult a human before it goes on to execute specific actions, he said.
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