Every number in the operating review improved once the AI agents arrived. Nobody can tell you who read the work behind them.
TL;DR: AI agents made output nearly free, and most companies still measure and reward output. So activity numbers rise while the work that actually ships stays flat, and the gap is paid for in review time by the people who still read, with no report tracking it. Under that incentive, skipping the read is the rational choice. The cost shows up first as a longer review queue, then as rubber stamps. Track review wait time alongside output, and make sending unread work back offend no one.
The work AI is absorbing now is the work we offshored twenty years ago, for the same reason. The advantage won’t go to whoever swaps a human for a machine. It goes to whoever redesigns the work.
AI had an alibi for the vanishing entry-level job until 2025. It won’t have one for what comes next. The work most exposed to it in the short term is the one we spent the 2000s offshoring, from call centers to entry-level coding to the back office, because both waves seek the same thing: how much of a job is written down and how little of it is judgment. That work already left once. The mistake now would be to automate it in place, swapping a machine for a person and changing nothing else. The larger prize, including for the economies that first took this work, belongs to whoever is willing to rethink how it gets done at all.
