Anxious about being replaced by AI, some workers have a new flex: bossing around armies of bots

As AI threatens to upend white-collar work, some professionals are attempting to flip the script. Instead of being outboxed by the bots, they're building their own — and bragging about how many AI agents they manage.

Mason Scurry says his AI consulting firm has more than 30 AI "employees" — complete with names, job titles, designated areas of responsibility, as well as personalities, backstories, and profile pics — that work around the clock for less than a penny an hour. Frankie, his chief of staff, is a longtime hotel head concierge from Bensonhurst, who keeps track of people and tasks, handles requests, and generally helps Scurry get things done. "Whatever it is, he knows a guy," his bio, written by Claude Code, reads. Penny, his "precise and never alarmist" token auditor, hunts down waste in how the fi

Maayan Sarig, a communications manager at Meta, says she manages a team of six, only one of whom is human. One agent, Moti, watches her work flow and suggests where she can save time. Another, Yonit, acts as a "cynical journalist," stress-testing pitches before she sends them out. "I don't just write," Sarig says. "I design the agents that write."

Derrick Hicks, a veteran marketer, posted that he built a team of 16 specialized AI agents — and then built another, which he named "Conductor," to help him manage all of them. His agents can audit a company's SEO, social media, advertising, messaging, and competitors, then analyze the results — a process he says has gone from taking him three or four weeks to about an hour.

"The other way I could have done it is hire people, like junior marketers, to follow my playbook step by step," Hicks tells me. "Instead, it's agents and code."

That kind of productivity gain can be real. But so is the temptation to make it sound more impressive than it is.

Unlike tokenmaxxing, which was largely engineers gaming internal leaderboards, agentmaxxing or bot bragging is AI status signaling for everyone else. As no-code tools make agents easier to build, the new flex isn't merely using AI — it's claiming an entire digital workforce. Amid anxiety about AI and jobs, "I manage 20 agents" sends a reassuring message: I'm not being replaced by AI. I'm the boss of it.

Scurry, a recent Brown University graduate, says he posted his bot count on LinkedIn to demonstrate what he can do. "Hey, potential client, this is how my system works," is what he hopes viewers see, he says. "Here it is actually working. Hire me."

He also acknowledges how easily the numbers can be gamed. The count itself doesn't actually mean anything unless the agents can actually do something. "A lot of posts are just like, 'I have agents.' And then you look at their profile and there's not any evidence that they've ever had clients or really built anything or have any sort of real business," Scurry says. "They're just building stuff to try to get engagement."

The fixation on agents is hardly confined to LinkedIn and is being reinforced from on high. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is building an AI agent to help him do his job and an AI version of himself to interact with employees. Meta is one of many companies using agents as a measure of how far they've pushed into AI. Last quarter, 2,175 public company transcripts mentioned agents, double what it was a year earlier, according to data from AlphaSense. Salesforce says more than 25,000 companies have built and deployed agents with its Agentforce platform. Walmart, meanwhile, has built a company-wide fram

The problem is that one person's "agent" may bear little resemblance to another's.

Robbie Allen, a veteran technologist who has founded three AI companies and now runs the Automated Consulting Group, uses about 25 agents for his own work. One scans his LinkedIn feed every two hours for signals like someone changing jobs, a company hiring or raising money, or an executive talking about AI, then ranks the best outreach opportunities for him. But it doesn't contact anyone: Allen still decides whom to reach out to and writes the message himself.