[2603.01203] How Well Does Agent Development Reflect Real-World Work?

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2603.01203 (cs) [Submitted on 1 Mar 2026] Title:How Well Does Agent Development Reflect Real-World Work? Authors:Zora Zhiruo Wang, Sanidhya Vijayvargiya, Aspen Chen, Hanmo Zhang, Venu Arvind Arangarajan, Jett Chen, Valerie Chen, Diyi Yang, Daniel Fried, Graham Neubig View a PDF of the paper titled How Well Does Agent Development Reflect Real-World Work?, by Zora Zhiruo Wang and 9 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:AI agents are increasingly developed and evaluated on benchmarks relevant to human work, yet it remains unclear how representative these benchmarking efforts are of the labor market as a whole. In this work, we systematically study the relationship between agent development efforts and the distribution of real-world human work by mapping benchmark instances to work domains and skills. We first analyze 43 benchmarks and 72,342 tasks, measuring their alignment with human employment and capital allocation across all 1,016 real-world occupations in the U.S. labor market. We reveal substantial mismatches between agent development that tends to be programming-centric, and the categories in which human labor and economic value are concentrated. Within work areas that agents currently target, we further characterize current agent utility by measuring their autonomy levels, providing practical guidance for agent interaction strategies across work scenarios. Building on these findings, we propose three measu...