How Will Managers Survive AI?
A Very Trendy Conversation Nowadays. My 50cs.
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur, and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach out to me and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
Everybody is saying that AGI is a few years away. My crystal ball for predicting the future only works in contained circumstances (my corporate day-to-day) and not for humanity-sized historical events. I'm not sure when AGI will come, but it's clear that AI in its 'dummer' version is already creating significant waves. Should we go back to school and study other areas of expertise, like plumbing? What does the future look like for us, the people who shape the future of companies, and maybe perform some tax savings? Well, I'll try to address those questions in this article.
The Soft Skills Argument
Any kind of leadership is composed of a multitude of skills, such as communication, critical thinking, people management, and time management. It's argued that these "anything-management" skills are what's saving this class from going extinct. This might be true to some extent, but the future could bring smaller teams, with fewer conflicts and fewer stakeholders to manage.
AI is expected to help remove complexity from important project tasks, especially knowledge-based ones. For a quick and practical example, imagine a highly skilled professional sends you an email about a project event, filled with technicalities. If the project manager couldn't understand that email, a series of exchanges would happen between multiple parties just to make sense of a single project event. Today, you can get insights from AI in a matter of minutes. While it's still beneficial to have different opinions and views, in the future, AGI-level AI could truly be the expert you need to consult. Given enough time, we might realize we don't need as much seniority on a project team, and everything will become easier to manage.
Much of our work relies on creating solutions for complex problems and finding strategies to make them work. Hopefully (or maybe not! evil laugh), AGI will handle much of the complexity related to projects. With fewer people to work with, soft skills will have less of an impact.
Preparing the Unexpected
Risk Management, in short. I can bet that if I jumped into a random company's project, I would find a list of risks and response strategies that were drafted and discussed ages ago, without being reviewed during execution. In the majority of cases, Risk Management is just a slide on a PowerPoint.
A good manager is ready to tackle the unexpected, finding solutions from thin air, mostly by exchanging ideas with different people inside or outside the company. Some of the highly tactical measures I've put in place were distilled from having a good network and knowing who I could call to help me fix a problem. Entrepreneurs are masters of this mindset, and their "pivot" mentality helps them adapt to different situations.
I suspect that management in the future will be closer to entrepreneurship practices than to actual management. Why spend time doing and discussing an ROI analysis if AI will hopefully do it for you in minutes with new ideas in the mix? Seeing opportunities and finding innovative ways to deliver projects will probably save the most cunning managers.
Negotiation Experts
Wait, is this part of the soft skills argument? Yes, but it deserves its own spotlight. There are multiple types of managers: some are more sales-oriented, while others are more operations-oriented. No matter what kind of manager someone is, negotiation is key for handling both potential clients and vendors.
Even today, AI can deliver very acceptable market research, and a manager can start reaching out to important vendors to help build a new product that would use AI to market it properly. No matter where AI is used, it will eventually need at least two people to agree on scope, cost, and time. No matter how much technology advances, it's still very challenging to get two human beings to agree sometimes. This might just save the Manager's job.
Ethical Oversight
This might be a bit of a stretch and clearly leans into futurology (like everything in this article), but ethical assessment of how to handle people and ensure the decision process has as little bias as possible might be very difficult for AI to perform.
This could be wishful thinking, but we know that bias can act as a blind spot, preventing a manager from making good decisions. No matter how intelligent AI becomes, it's only as good as the data it's given to make decisions or execute tasks. If there's a data quality issue or a bias in the data, the decisions that come from this "wonderful companion" will underperform.
This argument could be valid for a series of jobs in other areas and might even spin off into its own field. We know that when innovation kills some jobs, others are created. Could this be one of them? I don't know, but having human oversight on a project or process will be important to ensure everything stays within ethical parameters.
That’s it. If you find this post useful, please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest it in the comments or send me a message.
Cheers,
Artur
Truth is, even in the world of AI/AGI, leaders would still be needed, even if we don't need managers.
Your point about AI changing team structures gets at a deeper idea: "the medium is the message". The real impact of AI isn't the task it does, but how it fundamentally alters the team's communication patterns and power structures. The manager's new job isn't just to use the tool, but to become the intentional designer of the new culture that emerges around it.