Year: 2026 | Month: January | Volume: 13 | Issue: 1 | Pages: 331-350
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52403/ijrr.20260132
AI Agents and the Structural Transformation of Labour
Enrico Moch1, Peter Schlecht2
1Academic Director, Department of Economics, GrandEdu Research School, Germany,
2CEO, Department of Economics, GrandEdu GmbH, Germany,
Corresponding Author: Enrico Moch
ABSTRACT
This paper analyses the use of AI agents from a macroeconomic perspective. It shows that AI agents can trigger a structural break in the organisation of production and work. In contrast to earlier automation, AI agents not only increase the productivity of human labour. Rather, they are able to completely and permanently replace entire task areas. The central mechanism is a competition-driven pressure to automate. As soon as AI agents can fulfil tasks more cost-effectively than human labour, companies are forced to automate these tasks under competitive conditions in order to remain competitive. Automation is therefore not an optional innovation path, but an endogenous equilibrium outcome. The paper develops a task-based macroeconomic modelling framework in which AI agents are modelled as an independent factor of production that competes directly with labour for tasks. Decreasing agent costs and increasing agent productivity systematically shift an automation threshold over time and lead to the complete substitution of labour in growing task clusters. The analysis shows that rising output and falling labour demand can occur simultaneously and that productivity gains do not necessarily go hand in hand with stable employment. Furthermore, it becomes clear that the functional distribution of income is structurally shifting from labour income to agent and capital income, which creates potential risks for aggregate demand. The paper discusses these results in the context of the existing macroeconomic literature on technological change and shows that established models do not adequately capture the competition-driven compulsion for complete task substitution. The contribution lies in the explicit modelling of this mechanism and in the reassessment of the relationship between competition, productivity and employment in the age of AI agents.
Keywords: Labour market, automation, AI agents, macroeconomics, productivity, technological change, competitive dynamics, value creation
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