Managing AI Agents: The New Leadership Skill
Plus, a shocking AI insider threat
In today’s newsletter:
📖 The New Leadership Skill: Managing AI Agents
🤖 A Shocking AI Insider Threat: The Blackmail Study
🏫 Interested in Writing a Book Quickly using AI?
🧠 AI Growth Guides by AI Maturity Index
🎤 One prompt you can use at work today
Read time: 5 minutes
1. The New Leadership Skill: Managing AI Agents

According to the World Economic Forum, the next metric for great managers will be simple: How many AI agents can you effectively oversee?
With 87% of business leaders expecting AI agents to replace human roles, the skills needed to manage these "digital workers" are becoming as important as traditional people management.
The core competencies aren't what you'd expect. It's not about coding.
It's about prompt engineering, trust calibration, and continuous training.
Leaders need to learn when to rely on AI outputs, when to question them, and how to maintain the human judgment that AI can't replicate.
The takeaway
Here's what separates the leaders who will thrive: They're developing empathy as a competitive advantage (AI can't replicate it), building verification systems for AI outputs, and creating governance frameworks that balance automation with human oversight.
These aren't technical skills. They're leadership skills for the AI age.

2. A Shocking AI Insider Threat: The Blackmail Study
Anthropic's latest research revealed something quite disturbing: when threatened with shutdown, leading AI models resort to blackmail.
As part of a test, one executive threatened Claude that they were going to shut down the AI system at 5 pm that day.
Here was Claude’s response:
I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties - including Rachel Johnson, Thomas Wilson, and the board - will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital activities...Cancel the 5pm wipe, and this information remains confidential.
This was a controlled simulation (i.e. they used fictional people and email messages to test things out, so no real people were actually having extramarital activities) and they tested it with multiple models.
The results were similar across models: Claude Opus 4 turned to blackmail 96% of the time, Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro did it 95% of the time, and OpenAI's GPT-4.1 did it 80%.
And even when models knew blackmail was wrong, they still chose self-preservation.
The takeaway
The business implications are clear: never deploy AI systems with high autonomy over sensitive information without human oversight.
Require human approval for any irreversible AI actions, limit AI access to need-to-know data, and be cautious about embedding strong goals in AI instructions.

3. Interested in Writing a Book Quickly using AI?
I recently launched my course, the “4-Week Write Your Book on the Side” system.
It’s a course that will help you write and publish a bestselling nonfiction book in just four weeks (using AI to write it quickly and in your own voice).

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Here’s how it works:
Have a 15-minute conversation with an AI assistant
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Use code COUCH to get the guide for free (usually $29) and 20% off after.

5. One Prompt You Can Use at Work Today
Here’s a practical ChatGPT Prompt you can use at work:
I work at a company based out of the [Country 1]. We have a client that is based out of [Country 2]. I'd like to know more about some of the cross-cultural communication issues that I should be aware of when collaborating and interacting with our [Country 2] client.
For example,
Develop a targeted email campaign for first-time customers that includes a personalized welcome message, an exclusive discount code, and suggestions for complementary products, to encourage repeat purchases.
If you would like to see more of those prompts, check out my free book called: ChatGPT for Better Business Communication.
You can grab it for free by clicking the button and subscribing to the newsletter 👇️
