The new boss at work may not be human

A year ago, engineers at Snowflake, the American cloud-based data platform, spent part of their day doing routine tasks like scanning dashboards to make sure systems were running smoothly and chasing colleagues for data to conduct trend analysis.

Now, says Qaiser Habib, the company’s Toronto-based head of Canadian engineering, AI agents are doing much of that legwork, freeing engineers to focus on higher-level decisions.

Habib spends 20 to 30 hours per week interacting with five AI agents. Among other things, Snowflake has developed agents to review product design or assist on-call engineers in the event of a failure or incident. He estimates that the average engineer works with three or four agents daily, using them to complete coding projects under human supervision.

“You don’t have to bother people with basic questions anymore,” Habib said, noting that he still collaborates with colleagues on more complex work, such as…