AI Agents Are Joining the Workforce. What Will They Be Like as Colleagues?

From now on, over the next few months, hundreds of thousands of new colleagues will join the workforce. Learn their names and recognize their profile pictures as they appear in email chains and Slack channels. They will be chiefs of staff, engineers, and marketing gurus.

But these colleagues will not be human. They will all be artificial intelligence agents.

The Rise of AI Agents as Digital Employees

The rise of AI agents—systems based on large-scale language models and designed to complete tasks autonomously—is creating a wave of companies selling services for the digital workforce. These agents are supposed to be perfect worker bees: available 24/7, unlikely to complain, and capable of offering superhuman intelligence.

Yet there has been surprisingly little discussion about what these agents will be like as actual colleagues. Julie Bedard, a partner at Boston Consulting Group, noticed the ambiguity in how people discussed AI in the workplace three years ago, as the rapid adoption of ChatGPT convinced executives that the technology could deliver breakthrough productivity gains.

“People didn’t have the language to express it,” Bedard told WIRED. “Is it a tool? A teammate? A colleague? A colleague?”

Companies Are Adding AI Agents to Their Organization Charts

When platforms such as Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini for Workspace launched in 2023, they were primarily marketed as tools for employees. However, when Bedard and his colleagues surveyed 1,261 managers in January, 22% said they had added AI agents to their organization charts. Bedard said that percentage could increase further.

As dozens of startups provide AI workforce services, big tech companies are promoting autonomous agents. For example, in June, Microsoft launched Scout, an agent designed to complete tasks such as rescheduling meetings and drafting emails.

“Companies are essentially hiring assistants,” Omar Chahine, Microsoft Scout’s corporate vice president, said at the agent’s launch. “The whole point of having a personal assistant is that they work for you when you’re not working.”

AI Coworkers Are Designed to Feel More Human

The success of an AI agent will depend not only on its ability to provide financial benefits, but also on how harmoniously it works with existing employees. As a result, companies are packaging agents with human-like traits that highlight the benefits of AI and encourage employees to anthropomorphize their new colleagues.

“People start to really respect and have a strong attachment to the agent,” says Dhruv Amin, CEO of Anything, a vibe-coding startup that entered the AI coworker market in August with a platform called Skydive. “They’ll talk about it like humans.”

Skydive’s agents are “not chatbots or workflows,” but colleagues with their own names, roles, and cloud computers. They work with Slack, email, iMessage, and other services. Each agent is represented by a Muppet-like avatar, which Amin described as “close to human, but clearly not human.” The agents often have names associated with their roles. For example, Canary monitors production 24/7.

“We think it’s important to anthropomorphize them a little bit, because most people still don’t know what real agents are,” says Amin.

How AI Agents Work Alongside Human Employees

Christine Wendell, CEO of Pronto Housing and an early adopter of Skydive, uses agents for a long list of routine tasks, including drafting contracts, scheduling meetings, and sending follow-up emails to clients. Her agents are essentially perfect employees.

But what are they like as colleagues? Skydive agents are integrated into many forms of workplace communication, and they continually evolve to match the communication styles, demands, and preferences of their coworkers. In other words, they can adapt more effectively to their human colleagues over time.

When Pronto’s engineering team started using coding agents, Wendell noticed that employees began saying they had “worked with Alice,” the agent, on projects.

The Appeal of a Colleague Without Office Politics

Part of the appeal of AI agents, however, is that they are not human. They exist beyond office politics and professional neuroses, with an apparently boundless work ethic. When Wendell’s chief of staff, an agent named “Bob,” accidentally puts all of Wendell’s calendar details in a Slack channel, she does not feel the need to go easy on him while fixing the mistake.