FT: Agents Replacing Reports Forces Rethink of Manager Pay

At the Financial Times, Pilita Clark opens on a question corporate HR has tried not to say out loud: should a manager be paid as much for running a team of AI agents as for running a team of humans? For decades, how many people a manager oversees has been the quiet backbone of pay bands and promotion ladders. Automate the team, and the metric starts arguing against the person who automated.

"We are going to have to rethink definitively how people are compensated," Kit Krugman, chief people officer at the AI-driven supply chain platform Altana, told the FT. Altana has nearly 300 employees. Her point is practical: some of what managers do for humans, like feedback and direction, carries over to agents, but as she puts it, "humans are much more highly volatile than agents."

The column turns up one lived-in example of the new shape. At Daytona, a 30-person AI startup, each of its 16 engineers oversees about five AI agents on average. That is a different job than running five direct reports.

And yet, Clark reports, nobody expects pay to actually drop. There is no way existing managers would have their pay cut if they halved their human headcount and deployed several dozen agents, partly because they would have saved their company a lot of money. The outcome landing, at least for now: managers keep the pay, lose the humans, pick up the agents, and job architecture is left to catch up.

The piece arrived the same day our Jobs tracker picked up SHL's finding that 19% of US workers displaced by AI have been asked back by employers, one more sign the compensation side of the AI transition is still being improvised in both directions.