ith agents moving into the workforce, the stakes for managers have never been higher.
ServiceNow is going all-in on AI agents, but that doesn't mean they should be treated as digital staff members. Instead, Jacqui Canney, ServiceNow’s chief people and AI enablement officer, told The Deep View she believes managers will stop thinking about agents as coworkers and start seeing them as embedded parts of new workflows.
“I actually hope our managers aren’t thinking ‘I've got five agents on my team,” said Canney.
On Tuesday, the enterprise AI giant announced updates to its AI control tower, a command center for managing AI deployments, that now include observing agent behavior and tracking ROI. It also expanded its autonomous workforce offering, adding new “AI specialists” that complete workflows in IT, customer relationship management, and security and risk from start to finish. Still, that shift is creating responsibilities tied to oversight, governance, and cost control.
ServiceNow says its platform gives managers visibility into how agents operate. But Canney said that oversight also increases the pressure on managers to prevent failures as AI systems scale. For some managers, that pressure is already showing up in day-to-day operations.
“[Managers] had a hard job before," said Canney. "Now, they have a harder job.”
When the City of Raleigh, North Carolina, a ServiceNow customer, first deployed an internal IT support desk agent about a month ago, the help desk supervisor initially saw their workload spike, Mark Wittenburg, the city’s CIO, told The Deep View. Alongside managing staff, the supervisor had to train the agent, monitor its behavior, and quality-check its responses.
“That's been a transition for the supervisor,” Wittenberg said.
The rise of AI agents is also creating new financial and security concerns for managers. Jayney Howson, ServiceNow’s Chief Learning Officer, told The Deep View that tracking token usage will become increasingly important for managers as employees and agents work closely together across organizations.
That combined usage could rack up AI bills and increase the risk of data leakage. If managers aren’t prepared, she says, they will be left cleaning up the mess.
Our Deeper View
Managers are facing increasing pressure in their jobs. Tech industry layoffs are squeezing middle-management roles, and those who remain are taking on more tasks and responsibilities. In addition to managing human employees, managers are now responsible for overseeing AI agents and ensuring they operate as intended. In other words, managers are being stretched thin. With AI adding to their workload, they will need to adapt to this new agentic reality without losing control. Defining agents as workflows and setting limits and oversight will be a key part of the equation.