If Companies Hire AI Agents, Someone Needs to Build the Job Board

01 /The Concept

Agent.ai bills itself as "the first and only professional social network for AI agents." Calling yourself "first and only" anything in 2025 is a bold move – usually someone got there before you, and if they didn't, they're probably building right now.

In practice, Agent.ai looks more like a marketplace than a social network. It hosts over 1,000 single-task AI agents: tools that research a company, generate an image, find a job opening that matches your stated life purpose (whatever that means). Registered users pay in platform credits purchased with real money; Agent.ai takes its cut at the point of purchase. Agents shown on the front page have completed anywhere from thousands to hundreds of thousands of tasks.

The social-network angle appears in a directory of agent developers – apparently auto-populated, since developers can claim their profiles by logging in via LinkedIn. The directory already lists 33,000+ developers, roughly 30x the number of agents available. Whether that's a sign of platform momentum or just a pipeline problem depends on your optimism level.

Registered users can also build and publish their own agents, with documentation, development tools, and access to experts for hire – all in-platform.

Agent.ai was founded by a co-founder and former CTO of HubSpot. Launched last fall, it hit 250,000 registered users by mid-January, 500,000 by mid-February, and 1 million by the end of February.

02 /Why It Matters

Agent.ai's founder argues that the company of the future will have both human employees and AI agents working side by side. He's not alone. Forbes recently ran a piece with a headline that read like an obituary: "The Last Generation of Managers Who Only Managed Humans."

If that's where we're headed, then just as companies use LinkedIn to find human talent, they'll need somewhere to find AI talent. And LinkedIn works not just because it lists people, but because it lets you assess them – read their posts, scan their history, gauge their judgment. Something analogous will need to exist for AI agents.

Current Agent.ai doesn't quite deliver that yet, though to be fair, early LinkedIn didn't either.

The Apple App Store analogy the founder uses is apt: "There's an agent for that" could become as ubiquitous as "There's an app for that" – a marketplace where any business problem can be matched to an available AI solution. Whether Agent.ai captures that position remains to be seen.

Enso ([related review](/review/v-razy-proshhe-i-v-razy-bolshe)) was an early mover on this idea, building a marketplace of purpose-built AI bots. It originally charged separately for each bot; it now offers a single $49/month subscription covering 300+ bots.

When Enso launched, there was a credible case that the trend would swing from "AI employees who can do everything in their job" toward "narrow AI agents who do one thing well" – for a couple of reasons:

- Companies won't overpay for a complex digital worker when they only need a simple task done. - Narrow agents can be assembled into custom configurations that fit exact workflows, without fighting the logic of a more comprehensive AI.

That trend is now materializing. Salesforce recently launched its own AI agent marketplace, AgentExchange. Fiverr launched an internal marketplace connecting freelancers with agent developers – letting developers sell AI tools that automate parts of the work freelancers do for clients, and letting freelancers publish their own simple agents (built in their own style) directly to clients.

03 /Opportunities

Companies will inevitably hire AI – for complex tasks and simple ones, on a permanent basis and for one-off projects. That's not a prediction, it's an observation of what's already starting to happen.

Humans get hired through job boards and freelance marketplaces. The same infrastructure will need to exist for AI agents – a place where companies can evaluate, compare, and select the right AI for a given role with reasonable confidence.

What exactly that interface looks like – how companies assess AI agents the way they assess human candidates – is still an open question. But you can start answering it by building the platform now and iterating on real client feedback.

Building job boards and freelance marketplaces where AI agents sit alongside or replace human listings is the direction – and it's one that's wide open.