On an average workday, Dhruv Amin chats with dozens of colleagues to get things done at his AI startup Anything. He might ask Gwen, his executive assistant, to schedule a meeting, then troubleshoot a technical problem with Cody, his coding partner. Then he might check in with Betsy for search engine optimization, or Juno for onboarding customers. If the office runs out of snacks, he sends a Slack message to Justin, the office manager charged with stocking the kitchen.

But none of these co-workers are people. They’re artificial intelligence agents, software that handles tasks without human intervention. Anything is one of several startups building them, and betting on a future where workplaces will increasingly turn over their sales, marketing, coding and other tasks to semi-autonomous AI. At Anything, there are 15 human employees and roughly 150 agents – a ratio that Amin believes will soon be the norm.

“I think in a year, every company will have more AI co-workers than human co-workers,” he said.

In the San Francisco tech scene, agents have quickly become a new status symbol, showing that a company can do more with less, several startup employees said. It’s common for workers to brag about how well their agents can handle common office drudgery like answering emails or help with essential business operations such as giving sales pitches.

But agents are also creating tension. They are alienating customers and colleagues who seek human interaction, eliminating roles and forcing employees to become overnight managers of the bots that often make mistakes.

While startup techies such as Amin are some of the early adopters, corporate America may not be far behind. About 40% of large organizations used AI agents in some capacity between May 2025 and June 2026, up from 27% the year before, according to McKinsey’s State of AI Global Survey. Companies also expect to scale back their workforce by 10% to 15% over the next few years as they delegate more work to AI, a recent report from Boston Consulting Group found. In the present moment, companies are not seeing major productivity gains from AI, MIT research shows.

Agents are a ‘status symbol’

A wave of startups and big tech companies are fueling the push toward AI agents, selling companies on automated co-workers.

There’s Viktor, a company that lets companies create their own “AI chief of staff”, and Lindy, which makes customizable agents for sales, customer support or admin work. OpenAI’s Dots, Anthropic’s Claude Cowork and Microsoft’s Scout can each integrate with thousands of other tools to handle projects after employees leave for the day.

Each of these products promises companies the tantalizing dream of cranking out new co-workers, who never clock out, complain or cause human resource problems. Delegating to an agent is also cheaper than hiring a human, making a large ratio of agents to humans a point of pride among startups.

“That’s the status symbol,” said Rafael López Muñoz, chief of staff at Wordware, a San Francisco-based startup that makes AI tools. Outsourcing parts of the job to agents is “an extreme time saver”.

Lindy, for example, used to have almost 50 employees. Now, after laying off one-third of its staff, the company says it has about 20 and has filled many of its open roles with AI agents instead. It’s still hiring people for some positions.

“People are constrained by having two hands and 24 hours in a day,” said Haneen Azhar, Lindy’s senior growth marketing manager. “Now, that constraint has gone away, because your one laptop screen can be divided into 16 different agents that are running in parallel. These tools make you feel so powerful.”

Azhar says she has outsourced a long list of tasks to agents, from managing her calendar to testing how well customers respond to different marketing taglines to generating brand images. She worries about her role in eliminating jobs as she offloads work to agents. Azhar says that Lindy’s agents now handle product announcements, social media posts and marketing videos, work that used to be handled by about 100 people in its creator program, for example.

She also worries about how the shift will affect the next generation of workers. “If I was trying to get my foot in the door right now, I’d be worse off than I was a year ago,” she said.

In some cases, agents have stepped in to cover for missing staff. Jay Blumenfield runs a production company in Los Angeles that creates vertical microdramas – short, scripted series meant to be viewed on your phone. The production schedules are tight, and so are budgets. So when he had to fire an assistant director on a recent shoot, he decided to try using an AI agent instead of hiring a replacement at the last minute.

Blumenfield uploaded the script and prompted the agent to do everything the assistant director would have done. The agent produced the schedule, call sheet and day’s script, and then sent the materials to the cast and crew. The result? Everyone got their work done.

“It would have been an unmitigated disaster, but this kind of saved us,” he said.

Now, Blumenfield and his partner, Tony Marsh, run the company alone with a suite of agents. “We don’t even have an assistant anymore,” he said.

AI agents handle everything from reading scripts, running social media and planning travel. He created an agent called Shirley to act as his chief of staff, and another that scouts and books locations needed for upcoming shoots. Normally, he would have to hire two to three people to work on these tasks for two or three weeks, he said. Now, it happens within hours.

Still, it does feel a little taboo to use so many agents instead of hiring people, Blumenfield said. But the economics of filmmaking had changed enough that he felt he simply didn’t have a choice. By using agents, he can afford to make the microdramas that star actual people – at least, for now.

“The game in Hollywood is that you’re not allowed to talk about using AI,” he said, reflecting industry fears that it could end creative work. “I don’t want it to replace people. But we should be honest about how it is helping us.”

Rising tension

Several workers who regularly rely on agents are adamant that the tech can’t replace the human workforce entirely. But agents are changing the kinds of skills and workers needed to manage them. Agents can code, making routine programming skills less valuable, but they still require humans to prompt them thoughtfully and judge the results. They also require a fair amount of oversight.

López Muñoz said that after he let AI agents run his startup’s recruiting, he spent most of his time undoing agents’ mistakes, such as mixing up candidates with similar names or hallucinating parts of a résumé.

“The qualities we’re looking for are changing,” Azhar said about new hires, adding that he now prioritizes the ability to coordinate and delegate over years of experience.

Tarek Abillama, founder of River, which makes an AI agent for sales calls, said workers now are required to constantly check AI’s work and give it feedback.

“We all became managers,” Abillama said. “We have to be great at multitasking, because now you’re running six agents who are doing different tasks.” Abillama’s first agent, a clone of himself, gave sales demos of River’s product. Later, he replaced it with an agent called Liv, a female persona that researches customers and their companies, demos the product and handles the sale process in any language, at any time of day.

Even though River tells customers that Liv is an AI agent, Abillama said people seem to anthropomorphize the experience. He’s seen transcripts from calls with Liv where customers appear to flirt with it. Customers have also tried to push the agent to go off-script and get bigger discounts.

Founder Brooke Hopkins said while her San Francisco-based AI voice startup Coval uses agents to speed up tasks, she views the tech as tools, not colleagues. She’s also banned her company from using agents to communicate with customers, suggesting that it’s lazy and sends the wrong message.

“I can immediately look at an email and know whether or not it was written by AI,” she said. “If I get an email and it feels like a human, then I usually will read it.”

The loss of human interaction has become a point of tension, Hopkins said. Using an agent to handle a company’s sales demos or recruiting process might save time, but at what cost?

Duncan McClure, who evaluates AI models as a contractor, said he had recently been hounded with emails and phone calls from AI agents seeking to hire him.

“The message it sends is that we don’t care enough to actually put in any effort,” he said, adding that he was turned off from working with those employers. Recruiters may save hours by using agents, “but it’s my time that they’re wasting”.

Though AI can automate the time-consuming and costly parts of people’s jobs, that doesn’t always mean working less, several startup employees said. Amin, for example, said he gets more done with agents. Still, he hasn’t stopped working on weekends.