When Your Boss Is an AI Bot: Exploring Opportunities and Risks of Manager Clone Agents in the Future Workplace

2025-09-13

AI Summary

This study examines the dual impact of “manager clone agents”—AI systems emulating managerial cognition and behavior—on human-AI collaborative management. Employing design fiction coupled with generative AI simulation, we construct cross-group coordination scenarios to identify four emergent agent roles: agent presence, information conduit, efficiency engine, and leadership amplifier. Risks are systematically mapped across individual, interpersonal, and organizational levels. Our key contribution lies in the first empirical integration of design fiction and generative AI simulation to reveal how manager clones reshape managerial authority, erode or reconfigure trust dynamics, and affect organizational resilience. Grounded in co-designed deliberations between managers and employees, we propose a responsible integration framework emphasizing employee agency, strengthened interpersonal ties, and adaptive, context-sensitive deployment. This framework offers a forward-looking, practice-oriented governance pathway for AI-augmented management. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Agent-Based Simulation and Emergent Behavior
• Humans and AI: Planning and Decision Support for Human-Machine Teams
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions

Abstract

As Generative AI (GenAI) becomes increasingly embedded in the workplace, managers are beginning to create Manager Clone Agents - AI-powered digital surrogates that are trained on their work communications and decision patterns to perform managerial tasks on their behalf. To investigate this emerging phenomenon, we conducted six design fiction workshops (n = 23) with managers and workers, in which participants co-created speculative scenarios and discussed how Manager Clone Agents might transform collaborative work. We identified four potential roles that participants envisioned for Manager Clone Agents: proxy presence, informational conveyor belt, productivity engine, and leadership amplifier, while highlighting concerns spanning individual, interpersonal, and organizational levels. We provide design recommendations envisioned by both parties for integrating Manager Clone Agents responsibly into the future workplace, emphasizing the need to prioritize workers' perspectives, strengthen interpersonal bonds, and enable flexible clone configuration.

Problem

• Studying AI manager clones' workplace roles and impacts
• Exploring benefits and risks of AI managerial surrogates
• Designing responsible integration of manager clone agents

Innovation

• AI agents trained on manager communications
• Design fiction workshops for speculative scenarios
• Flexible clone configuration with worker prioritization