AI Agent Burnout: Running a Team That Never Clocks Out

None of my agents have ever asked how my kids are doing. They can work 24 hours straight with a little encouragement, which is starting to make me expect the same from myself. That is a team’s worth of output with none of the rhythm that keeps a team sustainable, and I am starting to manage myself that way too.

I am a founder-operator. I spent six years as COO at a startup that scaled to $50M in revenue, and I’m now building AI-native operating systems for companies, what I call a company brain, which means running fleets of AI agents as part of the daily work. I have watched the same agent run through an entire night more times than I can count, and it has never once asked to stop.