McKinsey's latest thinking names a job that barely existed two years ago: the agent manager, someone whose core function is supervising a team of AI agents rather than a team of people. The framing is deliberate. It positions agent oversight as a management discipline, not a technical one.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Most organisations have handed agent deployment to engineering and treated the management question as an afterthought. But an agent that hallucinates a client commitment or executes a flawed process at scale creates the same exposure a poorly managed direct report would, just faster and without the instinct to flag uncertainty. The skills involved, setting clear boundaries, reviewing output critically, knowing when to intervene, are management skills first and technical skills a distant second.

Very few organisations have actually built this role with any rigour. Most are still treating agent oversight as something that happens by accident, in whichever team adopted the tool first.

Who in your organisation is accountable when an AI agent gets it wrong, and did you design that or did it just happen?

#AI #Leadership #OrganisationalDesign

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