In 2025, we predicted that 2026 would be the year agents would earn as much as a person. It’s already happening.
In markets where there’s a labor shortage and an urgent need to hire people, we are seeing agents command 75%, 85%, even 100% of a human equivalent salary. This is faster than we were anticipating.
The first-order benefit is completing the work.
But there are second-order benefits that are now starting to appear. Training agents is significantly faster since all materials can be presented at once & in parallel to the AI.
Agents typically require less management burden. They can work 24 hours faster or slower as the team needs. Capacity scales as a function of willingness to spend on inference.
Then, a third-order benefit : significantly lower tax burden. Robotic workers are not taxed to the same extent as humans. No FICA. No state unemployment insurance. No benefits. At least a 25-30% cost reduction for the same salary. Plus agent software cost is tax-deductible up to $2.56m.
In other categories where AI is augmenting existing workers, the sale is different. Here, the sale captures the marginal hire rather than a big swath of the team.
In both conversations, usage tends to surge because of the effectiveness of the systems, much faster than both the vendor and the buyer anticipate.
At that point, the business often pauses because a strategic review of organizational design needs to take place.
The market rewards this shift. Goldman Sachs found that low-labor-cost stocks outperformed high-labor-cost stocks by 8 percentage points in 2025. Labor’s share of GDP hit a record low of 53.8% in Q3 2025. The implication : every dollar shifted from labor to software improves margins & stock performance.
Across the S&P 500, labor costs represent about 12% of revenues on average. Software costs sit around 1-3%. As agents absorb labor, that ratio inverts. Labor shrinks. Software expands. The total addressable market for software grows at labor’s expense, while profitability grows.
In the short term, this means no pricing competition on a per-agent basis. Vendors aren’t racing to the bottom ; they can price at par to a person. tomtunguz.com/observations-a…