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"Every agent needs a human. The further away an agent is from a human who's doing it, the worse it does.

Rohan Paul Twitter · Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) · 2026-05-22

Every CEO Dan Shipper argues that AI agents perform worse the further they operate from direct human oversight, and that AI's growing capacity for expert-level work paradoxically increases rather than reduces demand for human experts.

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Topics: ai-agentshuman-ai-collaborationfuture-of-work

Claims

  • AI agents perform worse as the distance between them and a supervising human increases.
  • Close human involvement is a prerequisite for AI agents to achieve their best performance.
  • AI's ability to perform expert-level work increases demand for human experts rather than displacing them.
  • Human expertise becomes more valuable, not less, as AI takes on expert tasks.

Key quotes

Every agent needs a human. The further away an agent is from a human who's doing it, the worse it does.
Even though AI can do expert human work, it actually increases the demand for human experts.