Good morning. AI agents may be getting smarter, but human managers are still indispensable.
Canva’s head of AI research, Stefano Corazza, said the company’s goal is to build AI around people to give them “superpowers,” not to replace managers’ strategic decision-making or soft skills.
BetterUp’s chief scientist, Kate Niederhoffer, distinguished between basic, collaborative, and adaptive performance, noting that humans—and especially managers—excel at the collaborative side: alignment, championing others, and cross-team trust. “And when they over-rely on AI or agents doing that work, we see really bad outcomes, and we also see collaborative atrophy,” Niederhoffer said.
Empathy and relational support remain areas where people significantly outperform machines. If managers hand these tasks to agents, both performance and perceptions suffer, she said.
Amazon AGI SF Lab cognitive scientist Danielle Perszyk argued that managers are currently “tethered to a screen,” with productivity tools that undermine productivity. She sees AI agents as “universal teammates” that handle digital busywork—navigating apps, tracking updates, orchestrating tasks—so managers and individual contributors alike can think more creatively and strategically.
Perszyk hopes teams will spend “far less time looking at screens,” but warned that current systems only simulate understanding of emotion. Her lab is working on “digital world models” and social training—multi-agent environments that mirror workplaces—so AI can better grasp team dynamics and support, rather than replace, the human emotional labor of management.
Toby Roberts, SVP of engineering and technology at Zillow, said that as AI absorbs more day-to-day grind, managers will gain leverage to focus on where human judgment and connection matter most, reshaping questions around span of control, skills, and team design.
