Future Business Setups Will See Humans and Agents Paired Together
Significantly, Microsoft sees human intelligence and AI agents working closely together in the workplace, a nice contrast to the rhetoric that AI is there to take jobs. Instead, Microsoft identifies the key areas where agents could assist humans, particularly as knowledge work increasingly consists of meetings, emails or pings that cause the average worker to be interrupted every two minutes.
Humans, the report outlines, work best in the realms of “creativity, judgement, and connection-building” and do not exist to “answer emails all day”. Therefore, Microsoft proposes that companies adopt a human-agent ratio metric within teams that sees agents take on easily-automated tasks under human supervision, such as emails, while the human takes on tasks better suited to their expertise.
If anything, Microsoft predicts that this collaboration will accelerate people’s careers, with 83% of global leaders stating that AI will let employees take on more complex, strategic work earlier on. Likewise, in a similar fashion to the rise of social media, AI will see the emergence of new job titles that didn’t exist before. LinkedIn data also showed that AI literacy is now the most in-demand skill of 2025.
