Workers Are Managing AI Agents Now. Companies Aren't Paying Them For It.

Sinda Khenine became a software engineer to build things. Now, as a software and AI engineer at appliance maker Electrolux, she spends much of her day choosing AI models, feeding them context, setting boundaries and reviewing what they produce, according to Business Insider.

"The effort is more focused on the coordination itself rather than the engineering problem that we are solving in the first place," Khenine told Business Insider.

She's not alone. At Wipro, the Indian IT services giant, chief technology officer Sandhya Arun says AI has boosted productivity by the equivalent of 20,000 workers, and she envisions "the same engineer managing a bunch of agents," per Business Insider. At Daytona, a 30-person AI startup, CEO Ivan Burazin says each of the company's 16 engineers manages an average of five AI agents. His claim: nobody at the company writes code anymore.

The Job Changed. The Paycheck Didn't.

People who took engineering, writing or design jobs specifically to avoid becoming managers are now managing anyway, just managing software instead of people. Business Insider frames it bluntly: congratulations, you're a manager now. No title. No raise.

That's where the legal exposure starts. Ogletree Deakins, an employment law firm, calls this pattern a "quiet promotion": an employee taking on higher-level duties like project leadership, budget decisions or strategic oversight, without an official title change or pay adjustment, sometimes for months or years.

Ogletree Deakins says the risk isn't hypothetical. Federal and state pay discrimination laws require that employees doing substantially similar work be paid equitably. When a company's job descriptions don't reflect what people actually do all day, two employees with the same title can be doing wildly different jobs, or two employees doing comparable work can sit in different pay bands. Either way, the firm warns, a pay equity audit becomes useless and a company can end up exposed in a lawsuit it didn't see coming.

Ogletree Deakins isn't arguing that stretch assignments are inherently wrong. The firm says they're fine when they're intentional, documented, time-limited, and tied to an actual promotion path with a defined review date. The problem is when a temporary favor to the company quietly becomes a permanent, uncompensated part of the job.

The Fair Case for the Other Side

Companies building around this model would say the productivity gains are real and workers benefit too. Salesforce rolled out what it calls "job-ready agents" this month for sales, service, e-commerce and operations, paired with tools meant to help employees coordinate and improve those agents, according to Business Insider. The pitch is straightforward: employees who learn to direct AI well become more valuable, not less, and companies that don't adopt these tools will lose ground to competitors that do.

There's also a genuine argument that managing five AI agents is objectively less draining than managing five human direct reports. No HR complaints, no sick days, no personality conflicts. Some workers cited by Business Insider describe the shift as a flex: they're not being replaced by AI, they're commanding it. Nobody is being forced to take these jobs, and workers who feel undercompensated for new duties can negotiate, document their expanded scope, or leave for a competitor willing to pay for it. That's how a functioning labor market is supposed to work.

But that argument assumes workers actually have leverage to negotiate, and assumes companies are being straight about how much duties have expanded. Ogletree Deakins's whole memo exists because plenty of companies aren't updating job architecture to match reality, leaving workers doing manager-level coordination at an individual-contributor paycheck with no formal channel to fix it.

A Bigger Pattern

The disruption isn't confined to office cubicles. An AI-driven shock wiped $285 billion off software stocks in a single trading session this year, according to the National Law Review, part of a broader 2026 in which US private equity deal value fell 37.5% in the second quarter and software deal value dropped 65.7% year-over-year. AI is reshaping capital markets and daily work assignments in the same stretch of months, and neither shift has settled yet.

On the HR side, Betterworks CEO Doug Dennerline, formerly president of SuccessFactors, told SSR he expects AI to kill the traditional six-month performance review altogether, replacing it with real-time coaching that flags skill gaps and prompts managers mid-project rather than after the fact. That could eventually formalize what workers like Khenine are already doing informally: treating AI oversight as a distinct, trackable job function.

Until companies update job titles, pay bands and formal review cycles to match what people are actually doing, the gap between duties and dollars is likely to keep growing. Whether that gap gets closed through negotiation, litigation, or simply attrition as workers leave for better-paying roles is the open question neither Business Insider nor Ogletree Deakins has an answer to yet.