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One member of Sumaiya Noor's customer service team is trying to overachieve — and it's causing her some problems.

So every couple of months, Noor said she has to carve out some time from her work to refresh the agent on what it's supposed to do, and train it on more edge cases.

"Over the period of time, it gets worse rather than getting better," said Noor, the chief product officer at a UK-based social-impact investment platform who also manages two other AI agents: a junior product manager and an internal "chief of staff." She said deteriorating performance was a major difference she observed among her three AI agents compared with her seven human reports.

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan painted a picture of digital twins taking his meetings while kicking back at the beach on a four-day workweek. Salesforce teased a similar concept: the ultimate corporate sidekick to fire off sales pitches and run your day.

Offloading tasks doesn't necessarily mean employees get more time back — and that might be the biggest misconception embedded in the promise of agents.

More output doesn't mean better work. In fact, it can often indicate the opposite. A recent Boston Consulting Group study of 1,488 full-time US workers described the phenomenon as "AI brain fry," which is the mental fatigue caused by excessive monitoring of AI agents. Participants reported mental fog, trouble focusing, sluggish decision-making, and headaches — strains that could ultimately drive up error rates and turnover.

"People burn themselves out signaling their worth," Wee said, adding that humans can't compete with agents.

Workers aren't just grappling with the reality of a constantly interrupted workflow — they're also on the hook if their agent screws up. The result is more time spent babysitting bots and policing legal liability.

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