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The next test of leadership is how well you manage your AI agents

By 

Diane Brady

Executive Editorial Director

May 11, 2026, 6:05 AM ET

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Today’s leaders are contemplating how they’ll manage an agentic workforce.Getty Images

• In today’s CEO Daily: Digging into the questions about AI agents that every leader has to figure out.
• The big leadership story: GameStop’s eBay bid echoes one of the worst business deals of all time.
• The markets: Mixed globally as an Iran peace plan stalls.
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. Who’s your agent? That’s not a question that most of us who work outside the realm of entertainment are used to hearing. But it’s a question that author and MIT fellow Michael Schrage posed to a group of chief financial officers last week during a dinner that Fortune cohosted with Deloitte and Salesforce in Boston. Schrage was talking, of course, about AI agents, those software programs created to autonomously take action on your behalf and interact with other humans or programs.

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The answer from our attendees was mixed: some CFOs had personal AI agents that they deploy to help manage workflow or prepare for, say, quarterly calls. Others are more focused on overseeing how agents are created and deployed through their organizations. And some were holding back to figure out the right guard rails and directives to put in place before unleashing too many of autonomous ‘workers’ throughout their corporations.

It was a timely and thought-provoking conversation for me because it touched on issues that I think every leader has to figure out right now:

The role of the CFO: They’re sometimes cast as the Debbie Downer of the C-suite: the keeper of the coin, Dr. No, the balancer of budgets, controller of costs, and reality check on corporate ambitions. But Deloitte research reinforces that the CFO is actually the enabler and core driver of innovation and the one “anchoring AI initiatives to measurable business outcomes,” as noted in its Tech Trends 2026 report. They have to measure the risk-to-return ratio on AI investments and figure out new ways of valuing the agentic workforce.

The role of the agent: Schrage talked about functional agents that are deployed across a team and personal agents that act on behalf of the individual. The latter may be designed to keep an eye on the former, and the bespoke nature of such agents raises fascinating ethical and legal questions about what happens to them when the human that spawned them moves on to another organization. It’s not a theoretical exercise. I have a digital twin. While it’s, ahem, somewhat simplistic and sycophantic in its current form, it could theoretically be deployed to one day write and speak on my behalf long after I’m gone. So who owns the IP on your digital self?

Corporate norms: If, as Schrage suggests, tomorrow’s leaders could include cyborgs with the intelligence, skills, judgement and authority of their human keepers, how should the work flow, assessment of employees, and corporate design be reimagined to accommodate this? Should super users be allowed to create as many agents as they like? How are costs and compensation calculated? Schrage predicts that “CEOs will be judged as much for their agents as for their hires,” as will other C-suite leaders. Their augmented ability to manage the augmented ability of others will make for very different relationships with coworkers, customers, and the communities they serve.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

The AI Industry Is Secretly Powered by Homeless People

Companies like Mercor are ushering in a new Wild West with no standards.

By Krystle Vermes

Published May 13, 2026 10:29 AM EDT

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Last year, a San Francisco-based AI company called Mercor exploded onto the tech scene, just as US workers were buckling under the grip of unemployment.

The online job marketplace connects contractors — often struggling unemployed workers — with companies like OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. The gigs have a ghoulish tint, since the basic idea is for former employees to teach AI how to do their old jobs. Adding insult to injury, Mercor is known for treating its workers poorly.

Now, a mini documentary published by More Perfect Union pulls the curtain back even further on companies like Mercor. In the video, reporter Karen Hao interviews a series of data workers — many of whom wanted to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation — about what it’s like to be employed by what the nonprofit calls “America’s AI sweatshops.”

Perhaps the project’s most eye-catchingly tragic stat comes from 2025 research by the Communication Workers of America, which found that among these tenuous workers training AI systems, a staggering 22 percent said they’d experienced homelessness due to their meager wages.

In the documentary, Hao also cites startling data from a study led by labor researcher Tim Newman. According to his piece, about 86 percent of data workers — those who may be training the AI models you use every day — struggled to pay their bills last year. Nearly one-quarter relied on public assistance programs, such as food stamps and Medicaid.

One interviewee who went by the pseudonym Jen told Hao that she faced an uphill battle in the job market after graduating from an Ivy League school with a PhD more than a year ago. Without any promising career leads, she was forced to move in with her sister and rely on food stamps. Out of desperation, she applied for a gig opportunity from Mercor that offered $55 an hour, far surpassing what she was making as a cashier and substitute teacher.

“I think the role I saw was philosophy intelligence analyst,” Jen told Hao. “I’m looking and I’m like, ‘Well, why wouldn’t I be able to do that?’”

But she soon realized there was reason for skepticism. A mere two weeks after her first project, Mercor entirely pulled the rug out from Jen entirely.

“We all get a message in our group comms where it’s like, ‘Actually, like, this contract is ending,’” Jen explained about her experience.

It turned out there was reason for her to be skeptical — and Mercor’s reported workforce of 30,000 may want to take note.

More on AI labor: AI Companies Are Treating Their Workers Like Human Garbage, Which Be a Sign of Things to Come for the Rest of Us

Krystle Vermes

Contributor