Robinhood CEO Wants Every Worker Managing AI Agents Around the Clock

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev wants every professional to run a team of AI agents that keeps working long after the human logs off. Speaking on the Sources podcast, Tenev described his “North Star” as a future where everyone has agents that stay productive while they sleep.

From Employee to Agent Manager

Tenev argues that companies should operate around the clock. In his view, each person becomes a full-time agent manager, with the job centered on directing and supervising software that handles the work. AI agents are systems that pursue a goal without needing a person to approve every step. They break assignments into smaller tasks, choose how to complete them, use tools such as web browsers, and can even spot their own mistakes.

The idea extends to investing. Tenev expects agents to account for a large share of trading volume among individual investors, provided users give them enough context. He said agents can work continuously, trade across several asset classes at once and navigate Robinhood’s options easily, free of many limitations that human traders face.

Why Agents Must Test Their Own Work

Overnight productivity, Tenev stressed, depends on more than a clear assignment. Agents need the ability to verify their results. Without it, they eventually stall and return the task to a person. That pushes companies to rethink how they test code and release updates, creating a loop in which agents build, evaluate and refine with little human intervention.

Tenev said AI coding tools have made him feel like an engineer again, and he predicts end-to-end automation of product and infrastructure development. He also pointed to research, once considered too complex to automate, as work where structured experiments and automated evaluations already make AI a natural fit.

If Tenev’s vision holds, the workday may end at sunset for people but not for their software. Oversight, context and reliable testing could become the core skills of the agent era.