I keep seeing a version of this with the companies I advise: the leadership team comes back from a conference (or a vendor demo) fired up about AI agents, a few months later there are agents for everything, and when you go and sit with the people actually doing the work, the mood is… let’s say more reserved. So I wasn’t surprised when a new Asana report, covered by CIO Dive this week, put some numbers on it. Asana surveyed more than 4,500 CIOs, AI leaders and workers in the US and UK, and found a proper gap between how leaders and workers experience agents.

The Numbers

68% of the leaders use three or more agents every week, compared with 36% of the workers. Fewer than a quarter of the workers say the agents available to them can handle the tasks they most need help with. Nearly half of the workers who use agents say they spend about 10% of their working time switching between tools, figuring out which agent to use, managing outputs or sorting out conflicts between them. And 38% of them say more than a quarter of the agents’ work is duplicated or overlapping.

Let me translate that last bit: a good chunk of these people now spend half a day a week managing the things that were meant to save them time. Go figure.

Why Leaders and Workers See It Differently

Here’s the thing: I don’t think either side is wrong. The work a leader hands to an agent (summarise this thread, draft that email, pull together the numbers for the board deck) is exactly the work agents are good at: self-contained, low on hidden context, and easy to eyeball for mistakes. The work an engineer, a support person or an accountant needs help with is the opposite. It’s full of context that lives in people’s heads, in five different systems and in “oh, we never do it that way because of that customer in 2023”. An agent that doesn’t have that context produces something that looks right and isn’t, and the worker is the one who has to spot it and fix it.

So when the report says the workers’ caution is “calibrated, not uninformed”, I’d go further. The people closest to the work are your best sensor for whether an agent is actually helping. If they’re lukewarm, treat that as data, and resist the urge to file it under “resistance to change”.

Measure the Work, Not the Agents

The line in the report I liked most comes from Arnab Bose, Asana’s chief product officer, who reckons CIOs should stop measuring agent activity and start measuring whether the work actually gets finished. Amen to that! I keep seeing dashboards that show “AI adoption” as the number of prompts, active users or agent runs. That’s like measuring a restaurant by how many times the kitchen door swings: busy, sure, but did anyone get fed?

When I built the AI scheduling assistant in Calendrz, the very first phase had no user interface at all. It was plumbing: the feature switched off by default (globally and per user), and an audit log where every single request ends with a definite outcome (done, poll started, rate limited, error, and so on). Not exactly glamorous, but it meant that from day one the question “did it actually do the job for this person?” had an answer in the database, rather than in somebody’s gut feeling.

What I’d Tell a Leadership Team

1. Count your agents, then cut them. If 38% of people see overlapping agent work, you have too many tools doing the same thing. Fewer agents with real context beat a dozen generic ones.
2. Ask the workers which task they’d most like gone, and start there. Not the task that’s easiest to demo.
3. Measure finished work: tasks completed end to end without rework, time to resolve, errors that reached a customer. Activity metrics will always go up and to the right, and they tell you nothing.
4. Know what every agent is doing. Nearly two-thirds of executives in a Workato report expect an agent in their own environment to cause a public security or compliance incident within 18 months. If you believe that, an audit trail isn’t optional.
5. Use the same agents your team uses, on their work, for a week. Truth be told, nothing closes a perception gap faster than a leader fighting with the tool themselves.

Bottom line: if your agents are busier than ever and your people are too, something in that picture is off. I’d be very interested to hear what you’re seeing in your teams, drop me a line.