How do AI Agents do Human Work

2026

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AI-generated summary

This paper provides a comprehensive comparison of AI agents and human workers across diverse occupations, revealing key differences in their approaches, strengths, and weaknesses.

* **Direct Comparison:** The study presents the first direct comparison of human and AI agent workflows across essential work-related skills like data analysis, engineering, computation, writing, and design.
* **Workflow Analysis:** It introduces a novel toolkit to induce interpretable, structured workflows from computer-use activities, enabling a detailed analysis of how humans and agents perform tasks.
* **Key Findings:** The research highlights that AI agents are overwhelmingly programmatic, produce lower-quality work but are significantly faster and cheaper, and suggests strategies for effective human-agent teaming.

AI agents, human work, workflow analysis, programmatic approach, human-AI collaboration

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