Orchestrating Human-AI Teams: The Manager Agent as a Unifying Research Challenge

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Masters, Charlie, Vellanki, Advaith, Shangguan, Jiangbo, Kultys, Bart, Gilmore, Jonathan, Moore, Alastair, Albrecht, Stefano V.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Masters, Charlie
Vellanki, Advaith
Shangguan, Jiangbo
Kultys, Bart
Gilmore, Jonathan
Moore, Alastair
Albrecht, Stefano V.
author_facet Masters, Charlie
Vellanki, Advaith
Shangguan, Jiangbo
Kultys, Bart
Gilmore, Jonathan
Moore, Alastair
Albrecht, Stefano V.
contents While agentic AI has advanced in automating individual tasks, managing complex multi-agent workflows remains a challenging problem. This paper presents a research vision for autonomous agentic systems that orchestrate collaboration within dynamic human-AI teams. We propose the Autonomous Manager Agent as a core challenge: an agent that decomposes complex goals into task graphs, allocates tasks to human and AI workers, monitors progress, adapts to changing conditions, and maintains transparent stakeholder communication. We formalize workflow management as a Partially Observable Stochastic Game and identify four foundational challenges: (1) compositional reasoning for hierarchical decomposition, (2) multi-objective optimization under shifting preferences, (3) coordination and planning in ad hoc teams, and (4) governance and compliance by design. To advance this agenda, we release MA-Gym, an open-source simulation and evaluation framework for multi-agent workflow orchestration. Evaluating GPT-5-based Manager Agents across 20 workflows, we find they struggle to jointly optimize for goal completion, constraint adherence, and workflow runtime - underscoring workflow management as a difficult open problem. We conclude with organizational and ethical implications of autonomous management systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_02557
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Orchestrating Human-AI Teams: The Manager Agent as a Unifying Research Challenge
Masters, Charlie
Vellanki, Advaith
Shangguan, Jiangbo
Kultys, Bart
Gilmore, Jonathan
Moore, Alastair
Albrecht, Stefano V.
Artificial Intelligence
While agentic AI has advanced in automating individual tasks, managing complex multi-agent workflows remains a challenging problem. This paper presents a research vision for autonomous agentic systems that orchestrate collaboration within dynamic human-AI teams. We propose the Autonomous Manager Agent as a core challenge: an agent that decomposes complex goals into task graphs, allocates tasks to human and AI workers, monitors progress, adapts to changing conditions, and maintains transparent stakeholder communication. We formalize workflow management as a Partially Observable Stochastic Game and identify four foundational challenges: (1) compositional reasoning for hierarchical decomposition, (2) multi-objective optimization under shifting preferences, (3) coordination and planning in ad hoc teams, and (4) governance and compliance by design. To advance this agenda, we release MA-Gym, an open-source simulation and evaluation framework for multi-agent workflow orchestration. Evaluating GPT-5-based Manager Agents across 20 workflows, we find they struggle to jointly optimize for goal completion, constraint adherence, and workflow runtime - underscoring workflow management as a difficult open problem. We conclude with organizational and ethical implications of autonomous management systems.
title Orchestrating Human-AI Teams: The Manager Agent as a Unifying Research Challenge
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02557