New Research: Productivity Gains Rise When Companies Pair AI Agents With Strong Oversight

Companies have spent the past two years racing to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) agents across sales, finance, operations and customer support. Now, a new constraint is surfacing inside the enterprise: the technology is scaling faster than the management structures designed to control it.

Autonomous AI agents are no longer limited to drafting emails or summarizing meetings. They are initiating tasks, coordinating workflows and making operational decisions across systems. And as authority shifts from humans to machines, executives are discovering that productivity gains depend less on model performance than on oversight.

A Thursday (Feb. 12) article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) said that businesses need to create dedicated roles to supervise AI agents as if they were employees. Without that layer of accountability, organizations risk scaling inconsistency and compliance exposure rather than efficiency.

That concept meshes with the views of CFOs in recent PYMNTS data that shows while executives are more comfortable with AI taking on more businesses roles, they are hesitant to relinquish executive decision-making control. The technology is more of a visibility tool than an independent thinker.

From Copilots to Decision Makers

The first phase of enterprise AI adoption focused on augmentation. Copilots embedded in productivity tools supported human decision-making. The user remained accountable.

The next phase is delegation. AI agents are being configured to execute multistep processes independently: reconciling transactions, reviewing claims, escalating support tickets and updating records across platforms. These systems do not wait for prompts. They act toward defined goals.

That transition fundamentally alters the accountability model. When a copilot suggests language, a human validates it. When an agent initiates a refund or flags a compliance issue, the system itself influences outcomes.

HBR framed this as a structural management problem. Agents behave less like static software and more like adaptive workers. They learn from data, encounter edge cases and can drift from expected behavior over time. Traditional IT governance, built for deterministic systems, does not fully address this complexity.

The Accountability Gap

As AI agents scale, enterprises face three emerging risks.

First is performance drift. Systems trained on historical data may degrade as conditions change. Without structured monitoring and retraining cycles, quality declines can go unnoticed.

Second is compliance exposure. Governance frameworks such as the AI Risk Management Framework from National Institute of Standards and Technology emphasize traceability, human oversight and continuous evaluation. Autonomous agents operating in finance, healthcare or insurance must meet regulatory expectations that go beyond technical accuracy.

Third is trust erosion. When employees encounter inconsistent outputs or opaque decisions, confidence in automation falters. That hesitation limits scale and undermines return on investment.

HBR argued that these risks stem from an accountability gap. When an AI agent makes a flawed decision, responsibility is often diffuse. Is it the developer, the business unit, IT or risk management? Without defined ownership, oversight becomes reactive rather than proactive.

The Rise of Agent Managers

To close this gap, HBR proposed a new organizational role: the agent manager.

This function formalizes supervision of AI agents much as managers supervise human teams. Agent managers define performance metrics tied to business outcomes, monitor outputs for bias and accuracy, audit decisions for policy alignment and oversee retraining when drift occurs.

Companies are already moving in this direction. Platforms from Microsoft like Agent 365 and Salesforce now include dashboards, access controls and monitoring tools designed for managing fleets of AI agents. OpenAI has introduced Frontier, aimed at centralizing agent supervision and reducing fragmentation. Frontier gives each agent a unique identity, defined permissions and guardrails, echoing how HR systems treat employees. The platform is designed to address “agent sprawl,” where siloed tools and disconnected workflows reduce effectiveness.

These tools reflect a broader recognition: autonomous systems require lifecycle management. They must be onboarded, evaluated, recalibrated and, in some cases, decommissioned. Treating them as unmanaged scripts is no longer viable.

As AI agents become embedded in core workflows, companies are effectively building a digital workforce. And every workforce, human or otherwise, requires management.

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