Agents
Agent Manager
When software plans work steps itself, a role emerges that did not exist before: someone who no longer processes but defines, checks, and answers for. The agent manager decides which cases a system may take over, how a usable result can be recognized, when to abort, and who gets the special case. They read the logs of the cases that went wrong and decide whether the limit is moved or the error stays. What is decisive about this role is where it comes from: not from IT but from the specialty. The scarce qualification is not being able to operate a system but recognizing a wrong result as wrong, and only someone who has mastered the process themselves can do that.
An example
The job has little to do with programming. An agent manager decides which cases a system may take over and which not, defines how a good result can be recognized, looks at the cases in which it aborted, and decides whether the limit is moved or the error stays. They know the field well enough to recognize a wrong result as wrong, and that is the scarce qualification, not the technical one.
A closer look
The role bundles four tasks: describing what the agent should do, defining what it must not do, measuring how well it does it, and intervening when it isn't right. That corresponds to what leadership means with humans, only more in writing.
Why it matters
The role is just emerging and has no fixed name yet; in Germany there is now a chamber of commerce (IHK) training course for it. It is interesting above all as an answer to a staffing question: when routine goes to systems, case handling does not disappear but shifts from processing to defining and verifying. For companies that is an opportunity, because the people with the necessary expertise already work in-house. They need no computer science degree but the permission and the time to define standards.
Commonly misunderstood
Without a named person, responsibility is spread across everyone and thus lies with nobody. The most common operational failure is not a bad agent but an ownerless one.
Where this term does its work in the magazine.
1 article uses the term or takes up its principle.