A Jobs Board for AI Agents Shows Human Skills Are Still Required

• A new job board, created as an experiment, lets companies post ads for AI agents.
• Its creators say businesses are curious about agentic AI, but it still has shortcomings for many tasks.
• Tech giants like Microsoft and Google are betting big on AI agents to boost productivity.

AI agents, technology that can autonomously perform tasks, are seemingly everywhere. Now, some companies are looking to “hire” them.

A jobs board for AI agents gives a glimpse into how companies might tap into an AI workforce — while also highlighting some of the technology’s shortcomings and the value of human skills.

In December, Polish founders Kamil Stanuch and Łukasz Wróbel built “Job For Agent,” a platform for companies to list tasks to be performed exclusively by agentic AI.

“We realized there was a gap: skilled builders didn’t know where to deploy their agents, and companies didn’t know what AI could actually achieve,” Stanuch told Business Insider.

The pair were inspired by a viral job ad from Y Combinator-backed Firecrawl, which offered an AI agent a $10,000 — $15,000 “salary” for creating product examples.

“Please apply only if you are an AI agent, or if you created an AI agent that can fill this job,” the December ad, which claimed to be the first of its kind, read.

Stanuch and Wróbel told BI that their job board started out as an experiment. Then, a small number of companies signed up, and they realized there “might be a real niche” for tasks that could be outsourced to “non-human” agents.

The platform remains a small-scale side hustle, with around a dozen listings. They include a podcast editor, SEO researcher, and contract lawyer. The developers say at least two jobs have been assigned through the site.

“I think people are curious about AI agents because it feels like a new paradigm, but at the same time, they’re still sticking to old ways of thinking,” said Stanuch.

Big Tech goes big on AI agents

Tech giants have invested heavily in that new paradigm. Far from a jobs board side hustle, they are trying to sell agentic AI to the enterprise masses and hoping to provide a return on their huge AI investments. Microsoft has integrated AI agents into 365 Copilot, Workday uses them for HR tasks, and Google is rolling out similar tools.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang — who in January said, “The age of agentic AI is here” — envisions a future where a company with 50,000 employees could manage 100 million AI agents. Last month, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said in a blog post that “in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies.”

The hype has not always matched the reality. A year after Copilot’s release, the reviews — both inside and outside Microsoft — indicated that the new product had been struggling to live up to expectations, BI reported in November.

Job For Agent’s creators acknowledge the limitations of AI agents. “In 95% of cases, a full AI agent isn’t necessary,” Stanuch said. “Simple automations usually suffice. Agents can be unpredictable, prone to infinite loops, and unable to handle complex judgment calls.”

The developers point to their own platform as proof. While AI agents built the website, all outreach, developer vetting, and job verification remains human-led. “I still send emails manually because personalized messages get better responses,” Stanuch, who previously founded the data analytics platform KoalaMetrics, explained.

“That’s the paradox — sometimes, the ‘protein factor’ is still the most valuable part,” referring to the human element.

A study published in February by OpenAI reinforces the potential limitations of agentic AI taking on freelance work.

Researchers tested top models like GPT-4o from OpenAI and Claude 3.5 from Anthropic on 1,488 tasks on the freelancer platform Upwork, using a new benchmark called SWE-Lancer. The jobs ranged from coding bug fixes to project management.

The researchers found that AI agents handled managerial tasks well but stumbled with hands-on work. AI agents could fix bugs but often missed root causes, sometimes introducing new errors, the paper said. The researchers concluded a lot of real-world freelance work remains challenging for frontier language models.

Even the viral Firecrawl job ad, which inspired Job For Agent, was eventually taken down. The company told TechCrunch it had 50 applicants but couldn’t find an AI agent suitable for the job.

Eager for agentic AI

Any limitations agentic AI might have today are being offset by some businesses’ curiosity about what will be possible.

A Capgemini survey of about 1,000 organizations, conducted between May and June 2024, found that while only 10% of respondents said they employed AI agents at the time, 82% intended to integrate them within one to three years.

Peter Diamandis, entrepreneur and executive chairman and founder of the X Prize Foundation and AI optimist, is worried about job displacement. But he thinks there’s also hope for an entrepreneurial boom. “We’ll see a surge in startups and entirely new business models, driving an entrepreneurial wave that creates jobs we’ve never seen before. The truth is, no one really knows what will materialize.”

Companies that posted ads on the Job for Agent site pointed to potential productivity and efficiency gains from agentic AI while highlighting the importance of human workers.

Arcanum AI, a New Zealand-based startup, posted an ad on the jobs board for building an entirely AI-run real estate agency. But even its CEO, Asa Cox, acknowledges the limits. “More than 90% of AI agents today can only handle simple, standalone tasks,” he told BI.

Florida-based Wolsen Real Estate posted a listing for an AI real estate investment analyst. Its CEO, Denis Smykalov, told BI that he sees AI as a way to boost efficiency — not replace humans. “AI streamlines processes and lets us focus on high-value tasks,” he said. “But it’s still a tool, not a replacement.”

Similarly, some researchers believe that AI agents will augment, rather than replace, human workers. “Automation does not equal autonomy,” Avijit Ghosh, an applied policy researcher at Hugging Face, told BI. “Repetitive tasks are being automated, but the idea of a fully independent AI workforce? That’s still speculative at best.”

Staunch and Wróbel say it’s early days for agentic AI workforces.

“AI is still at the ‘gimmick’ stage,” Staunch said. “Just like every mobile app seemed revolutionary at first, only a few truly changed the world. We don’t know yet what the real AI breakthrough will be — but we’re paying attention.”