» AFAM: AI Workforce Intelligence Series

As AI agents take over the daily operations of small businesses, a new function is emerging that owners can't afford to ignore: the Agentic Manager. For small businesses, this role isn't a luxury. It's the difference between AI that works for you and AI that quietly works against you.

Creating and managing AI agents demands a rare combination of technical fluency, operational discipline, ethical reasoning, and human leadership. Here is what it actually takes — broken down by tier, depth, and priority. Ask ten hiring managers what skills they want in an Agentic Manager and you will get ten slightly different answers. One will emphasize Python. Another will say communication. A third will insist that ethical judgment is non-negotiable above everything else. They are all right — and that is precisely what makes this role so unusual. The Agentic Manager is not a specialist. They are a generalist with deep pockets in very specific places, operating at the seam between human and machine intelligence.

The "human-in-the-loop" isn't just a safety concept anymore. It's a job title — and the most forward-thinking organizations are building entire teams around it. There is a peculiar moment unfolding inside corporate hiring departments right now. Recruiters who spent the last two years being told that AI would reduce headcount are now frantically posting job descriptions for roles that did not exist when they started their careers. The title varies — Agentic Operations Manager, AI Workflow Lead, Human-in-the-Loop Specialist — but the urgency behind every posting is the same: companies have deployed AI agents into mission-critical processes, and they have discovered, sometimes painfully, that those agents need supervision.

As AI agents take over routine tasks across every industry, a new professional has quietly become indispensable — the person who manages, monitors, and takes responsibility for the machines doing the work. Not long ago, the conversation about artificial intelligence and employment centered on displacement — which jobs would vanish, which industries would be disrupted, and what would be left for human workers to do. That conversation hasn't ended, but it has been overtaken by a more nuanced reality: AI is not simply replacing people. It is creating new categories of work that didn't exist five years ago. None is more consequential than the emerging role of the AI Agent Manager.