Your new coworker is an AI agent, and no one asked if you wanted one. Enterprise rollouts of coding and operations agents roughly tripled in the first half of 2026, according to internal adoption data shared by three major consulting firms. The awkward secret sitting beneath those rosy deployment numbers: no manager has figured out how to performance-review a language model.
Agents ship code that passes review but leaves tech debt no human would tolerate. They handle customer tickets efficiently, politely, and with zero understanding of when to escalate. The productivity numbers look excellent on the dashboard because the metric being tracked is velocity, not judgment.
The coming reckoning isnβt technological. Itβs managerial. Companies that treat agents as headcount multipliers without rethinking what oversight actually means are going to discover that a workforce of yes-men with infinite output is a very specific kind of disaster.
