Source URL: https://www.tomtunguz.com/how-many-agents-can-you-manage/
Source: Tomasz Tunguz
Title: The Rise of the Agent Manager
Feedly Summary: If 2025 is the year of agents, then 2026 will surely belong to agent managers.
Agent managers are people who can manage teams of AI agents. How many can one person successfully manage?
I can barely manage 4 AI agents at once. They ask for clarification, request permission, issue web searches—all requiring my attention. Sometimes a task takes 30 seconds. Other times, 30 minutes. I lose track of which agent is doing what & half the work gets thrown away because they misinterpret instructions.
This isn’t a skill problem. It’s a tooling problem.
Physical robots offer clues about robots manager productivity. MIT published an analysis in 2020 that suggested the average robot replaced 3.3 human jobs. In 2024, Amazon reported pickpack and ship robots replaced 24 workers.
But there’s a critical difference : AI is non-deterministic. AI agents interpret instructions. They improvise. They occasionally ignore directions entirely. A Roomba can only dream of the creative freedom to ignore your living room & decide the garage needs attention instead.
Management theory often guides teams to a span of control of 7 people.
Speaking with some better agent managers, I’ve learned they use an agent inbox, a project management tool for requesting AI work & evaluating it. In software engineering, Github’s pull requests or Linear tickets serve this purpose.
Very productive AI software engineers manage 10-15 agents by specifying 10-15 tasks in detail, sending them to an AI, waiting until completion & then reviewing the work. Half of the work is thrown away, & restarted with an improved prompt.
The agent inbox isn’t popular – yet. It’s not broadly available.
But I suspect it will become an essential part of the productivity stack for future agent managers because it’s the only way to keep track of the work that can come in at any time.
If ARR per employee is the new vanity metric for startups, then agents managed per person may become the vanity productivity metric of a worker.
In 12 months, how many agents do you think you could manage? 10? 50? 100? Could you manage an agent that manages other agents?
AI Summary and Description: Yes
**Summary:** The text discusses the emerging role of agent managers in managing AI agents, emphasizing the complexities of managing multiple agents and the critical need for effective tooling and project management strategies. It highlights a potential shift in productivity metrics as agents become more prevalent in the workplace, with implications for how workers interact with AI.
**Detailed Description:**
The provided text delves into the evolving landscape of AI management, specifically the future role of “agent managers” who handle multiple AI agents. Here are the critical points:
– **Role of Agent Managers:**
– The text posits that as AI agents become more common in various industries, the need for dedicated personnel to manage these agents will grow. By 2026, agent managers will be crucial in maintaining productivity within these AI systems.
– **Challenges in Managing AI Agents:**
– The author shares personal challenges with managing multiple agents, highlighting issues such as task misinterpretation and the variability in task completion times. The inconsistency of AI agents introduces complexities that are not present in other management contexts, like physical robotics.
– **Non-determinism of AI:**
– Unlike physical robots, AI agents are non-deterministic, meaning they can interpret and improvise with their instructions. This unpredictability complicates management, emphasizing that traditional management techniques may not apply directly.
– **Managing Multiple Agents:**
– Reference is made to standard management theories, suggesting that while managing up to seven individuals is common, managing AI agents presents a different scenario. Examples of effective agent managers who successfully manage 10-15 agents are provided.
– **Need for Specialized Tools:**
– The concept of the “agent inbox” is introduced as a potential essential tool for agent managers. This would act as a dedicated project management tool to streamline task requests and provide oversight of AI activities.
– **Future Productivity Metrics:**
– There is speculation that the number of agents managed per individual might become a new productivity metric, similar to annual recurring revenue (ARR) per employee for startups. This represents a shift in how productivity may be measured in the age of AI.
– **Call to Action:**
– The text concludes with an engaging question about how many agents individuals could manage in the future, pushing readers to consider their readiness for this upcoming shift in the workplace.
The text is highly relevant for professionals in AI, as it not only highlights the challenges and potential solutions in AI management but also anticipates broader industry shifts that could redefine productivity metrics.