Jobs / Management and business operations
Can agents do management and business operations work?
Managers, consultants, project managers, HR, logistics, and other business operations.
- US jobs
- 17,705,890 (11.4% of employment)
- Typical wage
- $111K a year (employment-weighted mean of occupation medians)
- Occupations
- 91 in O*NET 31.0
- Evidence
- 5 benchmarks from 7 institutions
Task level
Partial · thin evidence (fewer than 2 independent institutions)
Only adjacent evidence. On TheAgentCompany, which gives agents workplace tasks inside a simulated software company, the best agent resolves 42.9% of tasks (a November 2025 result). No task-level benchmark in our collection maps directly to management or business operations.
Evidence: TheAgentCompany — by Carnegie Mellon University. Reading dated 23 Sep 2026.
Agents succeed on some scoped tasks. Reliable or end-to-end work is not shown.
Project level
Partial
Mixed. OpenAI reports that GPT-5.5's GDPval deliverables won or tied against professionals' work in 84.9% of comparisons, and the best agent passes 73.5% of APEX-Agents tasks on the first try. Running a business is weaker: on Vending-Bench 2 the best model ends a simulated year with $15,515, about a quarter of Andon Labs' estimate for a good strategy.
Evidence: GDPval, GDPval-AA, APEX-Agents, Vending-Bench 2 — by Andon Labs, Artificial Analysis, Box, Harvey, Mercor, and OpenAI. Reading dated 23 Sep 2026.
Agents succeed on some scoped tasks. Reliable or end-to-end work is not shown.
Benchmarks for this work
- 1846 EloClaude Opus 5.5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Default Fallback) · 23 Sep 2026Unrated
Also relevant
These benchmarks cover part of this family's work.
- 42.9%TTE-MatrixAgent + DeepSeek-V3.2 · 10 Nov 2025Emerging
Functions: Financial analysisConsulting workLegal workProfessional deliverablesEnterprise workflowsFeature developmentLong-horizon autonomyRunning a business
What we do not know
- Benchmarks measure tasks, not whole jobs. A job is a bundle of tasks, judgment, and relationships.
- Capability is not adoption. A task that agents can do in a benchmark may still be done by people at work.
- Most results come from single runs. Reliability over many runs is often unknown.
Occupations in this family
Sorted by US employment (BLS OEWS May 2025). O*NET sub-occupations share the employment figure of their SOC group.
How to cite
Credit the original work first: the benchmarks listed on this page, and their institutions.
Then, if you used this page:
Can Agents Work. "Can agents do management and business operations work?." https://canagentswork.com/jobs/management-business/ (accessed 2026-09-24). CC BY 4.0.@misc{caw-jobs-management-business,
title = {{Can agents do management and business operations work?}},
author = {{Can Agents Work}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://canagentswork.com/jobs/management-business/}},
note = {Accessed 2026-09-24. CC BY 4.0}
}