Start-ups in San Francisco are filling jobs with AI agents, which are programs that do tasks without a person stepping in. Anything has about 150 agents working beside its 15 employees, with names like Gwen the executive assistant and Justin the office manager. Lindy, which sells agents, now gives them the product announcements, social posts and marketing videos that about 100 people in its creator program used to produce.
The pitch is smaller payrolls. A more useful question for anyone else is which work an agent can take over without making things worse, and the news holds a clean pair of cases.
An agent works when the message is worth what it says
The Los Angeles producer, Jay Blumenfield, makes short scripted series meant to be watched on a phone. When he fired his assistant director mid-shoot, the agent's schedule and call sheet were all the crew needed. He now runs the company with one partner and a set of agents, and scouting and booking locations, which used to take two or three people two or three weeks, takes hours.
The contractor who was hounded by recruiting agents got the same kind of software doing the same kind of job, which is writing and sending messages. The difference is what the message is for. A call sheet is worth only what is on it. A recruiting email is also a sign that a person decided you were worth their time, and an agent sends the words without the sign. Because sending costs nothing, the cost moves to the person who gets it, who has to read it, judge it and ignore it. The founder of the voice-AI start-up Coval has banned agents from writing to her customers for this reason, because she can tell an AI email at a glance.
The same split holds for a cold sales email, an apology to a customer or a note to a supplier you want to keep. A simple test: would the person receiving it mind if they saw exactly how it was made? If not, hand it over. If so, write it yourself.
The checking lands on whoever used to ask
There is an older version of this. When word processors and personal computers reached offices in the 1980s, executives began writing their own letters, and the typing pools that served them shrank or disappeared. The typing did not vanish. It moved to the person who used to dictate, who now had to write clearly and catch their own mistakes because nobody was left downstream to do it.
Agents repeat that move with a bigger job. A chief of staff at the AI-tools start-up Wordware gave his recruiting to agents and then spent most of his time undoing their errors: candidates with similar names mixed up, and parts of résumés made up. Anything names its agents like colleagues, and calling AI a coworker makes managers miss its errors.
Take a shop owner who has an agent chase late supplier invoices. Reading thirty drafts takes about fifteen minutes, against two hours to write them, so the saving is real. It holds only if the reading happens, because one mix-up between two suppliers with similar names means a rude reminder to a supplier who already paid. The work did not go away. It turned into review.
Where the first draft goes, the practice goes too
Typing was also an entry point into office work, and it closed. Lindy's senior growth marketing manager worries that a graduate looking for a first job is worse off than a year ago, and the typing pool suggests she is right to.
People usually learn to judge work by having done it badly themselves first. A junior who never writes the first draft will have to review drafts without that practice. Companies that want good reviewers in five years will have to build the practice on purpose, by having juniors check an agent's output next to someone who knows what a wrong answer looks like.