Hannu Rauma, a senior manager at Student Marketing Agency in Vancouver, Canada, has found significant relief in using an autonomous AI manager developed by US-based company Inspira. The AI manager helps the agency’s employees, who work remotely with flexible hours, to manage their schedules, workloads, and deadlines more effectively. It also records time spent on different clients for accurate billing, suggests improvements to written text, answers work-related questions, and updates everyone’s work progress in a central portal.
According to Rauma, the shift towards an AI manager has reduced his stress levels, enabled his employees to work faster and be more productive, and improved his relationships with them. The AI manager achieved a 44% success rate in getting employees to pre-plan their workdays in advance and was able to motivate employees to log in on time 42% of the time, comparable to a human manager. However, not all employees at Student Marketing Agency are using the AI manager yet, as a study was conducted to compare its performance with human managers.
Professor Paul Thurman from Columbia University argues that swapping management roles completely for AI would be a mistake, as the middle management layer is critical in any organization. AI can liberate managers from endless reminding and checking in, allowing them to focus on more innovative ways of working, such as cherry-picking project teams based on individual skillsets and overseeing the brief, then handing over to their AI to manage minutiae like deadlines. AI can also identify who in the team is falling behind and may need to be managed more closely by a human, and hone in on star performers who require extra recognition.
However, companies should steer away from AI managers becoming a surveillance tool, and instead find the right way to encourage the right behaviors. AI managers can also help people who have become “accidental managers” – people who excel in their roles and end up managing people as a result, despite management not being a natural skill for them.
On the other hand, an over-reliance on AI management sets the tone that companies only care about output and not people, and there are concerns about cybersecurity, as all the company’s processes, procedures, and intellectual property could be kidnapped or held to ransom if the AI manager is compromised. Therefore, it is important for companies to strike a balance between using AI to streamline management tasks and maintaining a human touch in managing employees.
