15% of Americans say they’d be willing to work for an AI boss, according to new poll
Would you trade your manager for a chatbot? A growing number of Americans are saying yes.
According to one Quinnipiac University Survey Published Monday, 15% of Americans say they would be willing to work a job where their direct supervisor was an AI program that assigned tasks and set schedules. Quinnipiac surveyed 1,397 adults in the United States and administered the survey between March 19 and 23, 2026, asking questions about AI adoption, confidence, and job anxiety.
Naturally, the majority of respondents said they would not be willing to trade their human boss for an AI people manager. But the use of AI as a supervisor is gaining popularity, even if someone is not directly responsible for managing entire teams of people.
Companies like Workday have launched AI agents that can do just that submit and approve expense reports on behalf of the employees. Amazon has new AI workflows implemented to replace some of the responsibilities of middle management, through dismissal thousands of managers in the process. Engineers at Uber even built an AI model of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi to give pitches before meeting their real boss.
In organizations, AI is being used to replace layers of management in what some ‘The great flattening.” Soon we could see entire billion-dollar companies of one, with fully automated workers and… executives.
Americans are wary about what that means for their job prospects. The majority of respondents in Quinnipiac’s survey – 70% – said they believe advances in AI will lead to a decline in human jobs. Among working Americans, 30% were very concerned or somewhat concerned that AI would specifically make their jobs redundant.
