This bit from today's NYT gets to the "we're all trying to find the guy responsible" scapegoat aspect of blaming mistakes on AI agents and treating them as employees. From the story:
"Emma Wiles, a Boston University professor who studies how A.I. affects workers, stumbled onto this phenomenon in October, at a conference where two human resources executives said that treating A.I. agents like real employees was a way to increase productivity and to put their companies on the cutting edge.
But when Dr. Wiles and three collaborators from Boston Consulting Group investigated further, they discovered a pitfall. In an experiment involving dozens of companies with A.I. employees, the researchers found that managers tended to vet documents less carefully when told an A.I. employee had produced them. The managers missed errors that other managers caught when told they were vetting the work of a human.
Dr. Wiles speculated that managers didn’t think sussing out mistakes made by A.I. employees was their responsibility. If something went wrong, they could dismiss it as the fault of the tech team, or of the executives who wanted A.I. employees in the first place. “But it’s not your problem,” she said, channeling the managers’ mind-set about their own roles."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/29/business/artificial-intelligence-workplace-consequences.html
