External signal·Harvard Business Review·Feb 12, 2026·Suraj Srinivasan, Vivienne Wei·9 min read
To Thrive in the AI Era, Companies Need Agent Managers
“I start and end my day in dashboards, scorecards, and agent observability monitoring”
Summary
Harvard Business School's Suraj Srinivasan and Vivienne Wei formally define the "agent manager" — the person responsible for making AI agents deliver real business outcomes by building AI operational literacy, defining tasks and metrics, evaluating outputs, handling exceptions, and monitoring agents for safety and drift. They open with a Salesforce "support agent manager" who oversees a fleet of Agentforce AI agents and describes his day as living in dashboards, scorecards and agent-observability monitoring. The piece pairs with Gartner's prediction that, through 2026, 20% of organisations will use AI to flatten their structure and eliminate more than half of current middle-management roles.
Predictions for the future of work
Predicts a new managerial discipline forming around AI fleets even as legacy middle management thins: as agents absorb coordination, reporting and monitoring, organisations flatten, while a new "agent manager" layer emerges to orchestrate human-AI teams — a title moving from non-existent to standard in a compressed window.
Originally published by Harvard Business Review · Feb 12, 2026
Read the original at Harvard Business Review