In this two-part blog series, Principal Analysts Anthony McPartlin and Seth Marrs debate the idea of AI agents as coworkers. Here, Anthony takes a skeptical perspective, while in his blog, Seth (ever the optimist) makes his case for a more positive view of AI agents.

An ad campaign has been running on bus shelters across San Francisco encouraging employers to “Stop Hiring Humans” and that “The Era of AI Employees Is Here.” The ad is part of a broader campaign by sales AI startup Artisan and aims to highlight the advantages that AI employees have over humans. “Artisans won’t complain about work-life balance” and “Artisan’s Zoom cameras will never ‘not be working’ today,” claims some of the other ads in the campaign.

AI Agents Are “Manna From Heaven” For Sales Tech Providers

Artisan’s approach is certainly attention-grabbing. But many sales tech providers are pushing a similar narrative to excite the market and reignite funding and growth. Early-stage investors such as Y Combinator are pouring money into similar sales startups, while even the mighty Salesforce is placing its hopes on its new Agentforce platform. Since its release at Dreamforce, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been touting such “digital labor platforms” as a trillion-dollar market opportunity. Benioff seems to have convinced the financial markets in the process, with Salesforce’s market cap rising by $50 billion as a result.

Agent Coworkers: Reality Or Fiction?

Amid the current hype blizzard around agentic AI, it is vital that sales leadership and those with ownership of sales technology can separate reality from fiction. They must understand the real near-term potential and priorities while preparing their organizations for longer-term change being driven by these innovations. Having spent some time speaking to this cohort in recent months, I think this is a challenge for many in B2B.

It’s Time To Take A Hard Look At The AI Coworker Narrative

Taking a more cynical perspective, here are five reasons why the “AI agent as coworker” narrative is nonsense:

1. It’s transparently self-serving. As mentioned above, agentic AI is a gift for the sales tech industry. When a company the size of Salesforce is using agents to significantly reframe the perceived long–term value of the company with very limited evidence, buyers should rightly be wary of the claims being made.
2. It’s just automation. You have to admire Benioff’s chutzpah in defining digital labor as some brand-new massive market opportunity. But to many, it just sounds like automation. Like every other phase of automation since the beginning of the industrial age, this phase is also about doing more with fewer human resources.
3. The market is blurring agentic differentiation. Forrester defines agentic AI as general AI systems, trained to act invisibly on behalf of an enterprise or individual, performing tasks, making decisions, and interacting with data or other systems autonomously. But with agents the flavor of the month in B2B tech, providers have been adjusting their go-to-market efforts for existing approaches to bask in the agent glow. Copilots, intelligent assistants, and single and multiple agents all now occupy a spectrum of what is claimed to be agentic, creating confusion and increasing skepticism for buyers.
4. There’s a false equivalency of agents as virtual employees. Attempts to establish some sort of equivalency between agents and actual employees is not only misleading but demeaning to B2B professions. It misrepresents the agentic role in B2B processes, which will increasingly be invisible to both employees and customers. “Coworker” suggests relationships or partnerships to complete tasks or processes. Human employees surrounded by AI robots at Amazon warehouses or Tesla factories do not see these robots as “coworkers,” so why should sellers?
5. The ROI potential is exaggerated. In the world of software, providers talking big on ROI and productivity is nothing new. The hype around agents often presents a form of sales leadership “fever dream” of 24-hour selling uninterrupted by sickness or PTO. But the limited, task-level scope of many proclaimed “agent” solutions should rightly make buyers wary. Forrester’s ongoing studies of sales productivity over the past 10 years or more have shown that the explosion in sales technology during this period has only had limited impact on seller productivity. Sales productivity has a tendency to soak up the productivity enhancements provided by evolutionary waves of sales technology, finding new efficiency barriers and roadblocks along the way. Potential AI impacts on productivity should be viewed in this context.

Healthy AI Skepticism Is Good

Holding such views does not automatically imply that you may be an AI troglodyte. Being skeptical of the coworker narrative is not at odds necessarily with believing in the long-term value or impact of AI in sales. Having a balanced view will actually help inform a better AI strategy and priortitize more impactful use cases. It should also inform stronger change management approaches that combine adoption, employee satisfaction, and, ultimately, more significant company impact.

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