Welcome to the Era of Agent Team Management

2025: AI will take your job!
2026: AI wants to hire you.

Rent-A-Human, a new platform where AI agents hire humans to perform real-world physical tasks, completely flips the expected script. 

For decades, we sought to build intelligent robots and free humans from tedious physical labor. The vision was robots handling tedious physical work, while humans would focus on intellectual and creative tasks.

Fast forward today, and AI now performs many intellectual and creative tasks faster than humans, while human dexterity still outperforms robots in a majority of physical tasks (at least for now …).

But the real question isn’t whether AI will do all intellectual tasks and humans all physical tasks, or vice versa. Rather, we’re experiencing a human-AI work co-evolution.

I trace this human-AI work co-evolution in multiple phases:

• Phase 1 is the chatbot phase. AI learned to search and synthesize internet knowledge faster than humans. Humans stopped browsing various online and offline knowledge sources and evolved to become prompt engineers.
• Phase 2 is the agent phase. AI evolved to use digital tools, interfaces, and take actions. Humans evolved to do more structured prompt engineering, agent context management, guide and review agent outputs.

In the next phase of this evolution, I believe a new discipline - Agent Team Management - will emerge, characterized by best practices on managing teams of AI agents with specialized roles (technology, design, marketing, etc). Most knowledge workers will become Agent Team Managers, instructing their agent team, providing feedback, reviewing the team’s output, and ultimately being accountable for it.

The recent release of Agent Teams in Anthropic's Claude Code and similar platforms marks the beginning of this next phase. 

Welcome to the era of Agent Team Management.