Good morning. AI agents may be getting smarter, but human managers are still indispensable.
At the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, in a panel session hosted by Workday, executives said the real shift is that software is stripping out drudgery and redefining good management as coaching, judgment, and emotional leadership rather than task supervision.
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.
Aashna Kircher, group general manager in the Office of the CHRO at Workday, said many managers still spend too much time on tedious tasks. AI agents can remove much of that burden, but companies must also reset expectations, hold managers accountable, and train them in judgment, Kircher explained. She suggested companies should reflect on questions such as: “What does it mean to be the best coach or the best team enabler? What are the skill sets that you now have to grow in your teams in an era of AI, where the expectation is judgment, decision-making, and creativity?”
Where humans must still lead
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.
You can watch the complete panel session here.
Sheryl Estrada [email protected]
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