Congratulations, you're a manager now! But there's no promotion — or a raise

Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI You entered your profession because you wanted to teach, code, write, create, or design.

But thanks to AI — and the immense pressure to use it — you now spend less time practicing your craft and more time managing the technology that's doing the work you wanted to do.

For many professionals, that means supervising agents: tools designed to perform tasks autonomously but that, in practice, require workers to set expectations, delegate assignments, evaluate performance, demand revisions, and intervene when things go wrong.

Others manage a steady pipeline of AI-generated work, reviewing the output and taking responsibility for what ultimately ships.

Congratulations! You're a manager now.

You just won't be receiving the title or the raise.

The idea that AI will turn everyone into a manager has been floating around for a while.

Now companies are building around that premise.

Salesforce unveiled earlier this month "job-ready agents" designed to do work in sales, customer service, e-commerce, and internal operations, while giving human employees tools to teach agents about their companies, coordinate them, and improve their performance.

Meanwhile, Wipro, an Indian IT services company, has increased productivity through AI by the equivalent of 20,000 workers, according to chief technology officer Sandhya Arun, who envisions "the same engineer managing a bunch of agents." At Daytona, a 30-person AI startup, each of the company's 16 engineers manages an average of five AI agents, CEO Ivan Burazin recently told Business Insider .

It's to the point where he says no one at the company writes code anymore.

For some workers, managing a digital workforce has become a new kind of workplace flex .

I'm not being replaced by AI; I rule over AI.

But plenty of others never asked to become the boss of the bots.