By Contributor,Curt Steinhorst

Copyright forbes

Agent Management

Micah Davis hadn’t checked his phone in three days—a personal record for the CEO of a 36-person software consultancy that produces the work of a 60-person team, thanks to AI. His family’s cabin in Lake Tahoe had spotty internet, which he’d considered a blessing. Until the drive home.

By the time he reached Sacramento, the anxiety was physical. His chest tightened as he mentally cataloged what he’d missed: Claude had updated twice. OpenAI released new features. His ten personally-built AI agents—each requiring new tasks roughly every 30 minutes to remain effective—had been running on autopilot for 72 hours when autopilot only runs about 30 minutes maximum.

At dinner that night, his wife noticed him typing under the table. “Just giving the agents new parameters,” he explained, unable to shake the feeling that every moment spent on human activities was computational capacity wasted.

“It’s like having ten brilliant interns who need constant supervision, except they never sleep and I’m the only one who knows how to manage them.”

This isn’t an isolated anecdote; it’s a defining crisis of modern leadership. We’re told that to be an effective leader, you must be a practitioner—hands-on with the latest tools—and that is true. Leaders must be perpetual beginners, exploring and experimenting to gain insight. The crisis, however, is that this exploration is devolving into an operational burden that turns leadership into a treadmill.

The New Executive Burden: When Leadership Means Learning to Let Go

The data shows AI is no longer a future trend; it’s the present. A 2024 IBM Institute for Business Value study on AI governance found that nearly half of the respondents were concerned about data accuracy and bias, highlighting that the technology is now an integral part of operations with its own set of management challenges. We’ve moved from asking if we should adopt AI to a more fundamental question: how do we govern and lead a workforce that includes machines?

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The velocity of change is unprecedented. The Stanford AI Index for 2025 notes that performance on key benchmarks rose by as much as 67 percentage points in just one year, with agents outperforming humans in specific, short-term tasks. The psychological impact is profound. While AI proficiency has become a baseline requirement in the workplace, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that analytical thinking remains the top skill employers seek, with 70% of companies considering it essential, followed by resilience, flexibility, and creative thinking. These are the skills that require deep thought and reflection—precisely the kind of thinking the “always-on” AI mindset prevents.

This gap between urgency and understanding creates a new kind of executive burden. You can’t govern what you don’t understand, but you also can’t personally master everything without becoming a bottleneck.

The Agent Management Trap: The Cost of Confusing Motion With Progress

The specific challenge of AI agents reveals why this particular innovation differs from those in the past. Traditional software behaves predictably—you set up an ERP system, and it runs the same processes until you change them. AI agents, however, exhibit behavioral drift. Without regular recalibration and new objectives, their outputs can become progressively less aligned with intended goals, creating a constant need for a “human in the loop.”

This is the Agent Management Trap. The executives most committed to understanding AI—those building and running their own agents—become trapped in an operational loop that prevents strategic thinking. It’s the equivalent of a CEO personally managing every fresh graduate hire, except these “hires” need direction every few minutes, not weeks. The PWC 2025 Global CEO Survey revealed that while over 50% of CEOs saw efficiency gains from AI, only a third saw profitability increases. This efficiency-to-value gap shows that motion doesn’t equal progress. We’re getting faster at the wrong things.

The contrarian idea here is that the CEO isn’t supposed to be the smartest person in the room about every AI capability. They are an orchestrator, not a conductor. The true value comes from knowing when to use AI, not how to build it.

The Sustainable Alternative: Moving From Mastery to Orchestration

The leaders who will thrive in this environment aren’t those who have mastered every new tool. They are the ones who are intentional about what they choose to ignore. They shift from a mindset of consumption to one of creation. Here’s how they do it:

Embrace Strategic Ignorance: Don’t even try to know everything. Instead, define your “why” before your “what.” Ask: “What is the specific business problem we are trying to solve?” This anchors your team’s efforts and prevents the aimless experimentation that leads to burnout. You can’t optimize what you can’t define.

Focus on Value, Not Velocity: Don’t measure success by how many AI tools you’ve adopted or how fast your team is working. Measure it by the impact on your business. This reflects the efficiency-to-value gap in PwC’s survey, showing that leaders must bridge efficiency gains with financial impact. When AI reduces report time, the leader’s job is to ensure that saved time is re-invested into revenue-generating activities like client engagement.

Build a “Translation Layer”: The most successful organizations are creating teams that bridge the technical and strategic divide. This isn’t just an IT department; it’s a cross-functional group of “AI stewards” or “bot managers” who understand both the technology and the business goals. Their job is to stay current with the tools, manage the agents, and translate complex technical capabilities into clear business value. This frees up the leadership to focus on governance, not management.

Micah’s anxieties on the drive home didn’t signal a retreat from AI, but rather a deepening of his commitment to it. How could it not? His team is now doing nearly double the work, a testament to the technology’s transformative power. This is the new reality leaders must embrace—and push their people to adopt. Micah reminds his team regularly that they are Tony Stark, but to harness their genius, they need to wear the Iron Man suit.

The commitment to being on the cutting edge, however, must be accompanied by a unique set of behaviors and skills designed to maximize the tool’s use. And the only way to avoid becoming, as Henry David Thoreau said, “tools of our tools.” The way to avoid this trap isn’t through technical mastery, but through the strategic clarity to know when to deploy AI—and when to step away from it.

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