AI coworkers? Inside the workplace where 150 agents outnumber 15 humans

At his AI startup Anything, Dhruv Amin spends his average workday chatting with dozens of colleagues. He asks Gwen, his executive assistant, to schedule a meeting. He troubleshoots a technical problem with Cody, his coding partner. He checks in with Betsy about search engine optimization and with Juno about onboarding customers. When the office runs out of snacks, he sends a Slack message to Justin, the office manager in charge of stocking the kitchen. None of these co-workers are people. They are artificial intelligence agents: software that handles tasks without human intervention. Anything is one of several startups building these agents. The companies are betting on a future where workplaces increasingly hand over sales, marketing, coding and other tasks to semi-autonomous AI. At Anything, 15 human employees work alongside roughly 150 agents, a ratio Amin believes will soon be the norm. Companies using AI for roles from executive assistants to chiefs of staff are boasting about doing more with less. The approach is creating tension with their human workers.