{"slug": "of-leaders-workers-and-too-many-ai-agents", "title": "Of Leaders, Workers and Too Many AI Agents", "summary": "An Asana survey of more than 4,500 CIOs, AI leaders and workers in the US and UK found that 68% of leaders use three or more AI agents weekly versus 36% of workers, and that nearly half of agent-using workers spend about 10% of their time switching between tools, choosing agents or resolving conflicting outputs. Consultant Liviu Tudor, who built the Calendrz AI scheduling assistant, argues that workers' caution is \"calibrated, not uninformed\" and that teams should measure whether work gets finished rather than agent activity, citing Asana chief product officer Arnab Bose's call to stop tracking agent activity as a success metric.", "body_md": "I keep seeing a version of this with the companies I advise: the leadership team comes back from a conference (or a vendor demo) fired up about AI agents, a few months later there are agents for everything, and when you go and sit with the people actually doing the work, the mood is… let’s say more reserved. So I wasn’t surprised when a [new Asana report](https://ciodive.com/news/agentic-gap-executives-workers/833289), covered by CIO Dive this week, put some numbers on it. Asana surveyed more than 4,500 CIOs, AI leaders and workers in the US and UK, and found a proper gap between how leaders and workers experience agents.\n\n68% of the leaders use three or more agents every week, compared with 36% of the workers. Fewer than a quarter of the workers say the agents available to them can handle the tasks they most need help with. Nearly half of the workers who use agents say they spend about 10% of their working time switching between tools, figuring out which agent to use, managing outputs or sorting out conflicts between them. And 38% of them say more than a quarter of the agents’ work is duplicated or overlapping.\n\nLet me translate that last bit: a good chunk of these people now spend half a day a week managing the things that were meant to save them time. Go figure.\n\nHere’s the thing: I don’t think either side is wrong. The work a leader hands to an agent (summarise this thread, draft that email, pull together the numbers for the board deck) is exactly the work agents are good at: self-contained, low on hidden context, and easy to eyeball for mistakes. The work an engineer, a support person or an accountant needs help with is the opposite. It’s full of context that lives in people’s heads, in five different systems and in “oh, we never do it that way because of that customer in 2023”. An agent that doesn’t have that context produces something that looks right and isn’t, and the worker is the one who has to spot it and fix it.\n\nSo when the report says the workers’ caution is “calibrated, not uninformed”, I’d go further. The people closest to the work are your best sensor for whether an agent is actually helping. If they’re lukewarm, treat that as data, and resist the urge to file it under “resistance to change”.\n\nThe line in the report I liked most comes from Arnab Bose, Asana’s chief product officer, who reckons CIOs should stop measuring agent activity and start measuring whether the work actually gets finished. Amen to that! I keep seeing dashboards that show “AI adoption” as the number of prompts, active users or agent runs. That’s like measuring a restaurant by how many times the kitchen door swings: busy, sure, but did anyone get fed?\n\nWhen I built the AI scheduling assistant in [Calendrz](https://calendrz.com), the very first phase had no user interface at all. It was plumbing: the feature switched off by default (globally and per user), and an audit log where every single request ends with a definite outcome (done, poll started, rate limited, error, and so on). Not exactly glamorous, but it meant that from day one the question “did it actually do the job for this person?” had an answer in the database, rather than in somebody’s gut feeling.\n\nBottom line: if your agents are busier than ever and your people are too, something in that picture is off. I’d be very interested to hear what you’re seeing in your teams, [drop me a line](http://liviutudor.com/contact-me/).\n\n*Originally published on [liviutudor.com](https://liviutudor.com/2026/10/21/of-leaders-workers-and-too-many-ai-agents/).*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/of-leaders-workers-and-too-many-ai-agents", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/liviu_tudor_usa/of-leaders-workers-and-too-many-ai-agents-5dbn", "published_at": "2026-10-22 14:40:31+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-22 14:43:08.723178+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-products", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Asana", "CIO Dive", "Arnab Bose", "Liviu Tudor", "Calendrz"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/of-leaders-workers-and-too-many-ai-agents", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/of-leaders-workers-and-too-many-ai-agents.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/of-leaders-workers-and-too-many-ai-agents.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/of-leaders-workers-and-too-many-ai-agents.jsonld"}}