When AI becomes a member of the team, is the manager ready?
Listen to this article
Read by Anchor
When AI becomes a member of the team, is the manager ready?
By: Walid Marwan
In the previous article I discussed a question that has begun to occupy me as the use of artificial intelligence expands in the workplace: if AI takes on a large portion of a new employee’s tasks, how do we develop their expertise in the future?
While thinking about the issue, another question that might be larger came to mind. We talk a lot about the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs, skills and employees, but we rarely pause to consider its effect on the manager themselves.
Because if we reach a point where artificial intelligence is no longer just a tool that helps us, but has begun to carry out full tasks, searching, analyzing, monitoring and proposing solutions… we will gradually be facing a new kind of work team.
And here’s the question: is the manager ready to lead a team whose members are not all human?
The delegation itself has begun to change.
We have spent our whole careers teaching managers skills such as delegation, performance management, communication, feedback and building trust. All of these skills will remain important.
But the presence of artificial intelligence has added a new question that was not previously as clear: who is supposed to carry out this task?
Back then, the question was: which employee from the team could I delegate the task to?
Today the question might be: Does the task originally require a human? Can artificial intelligence perform part of it? Does the human only review? Or does the task itself need human judgment from the start?
This means that the manager’s role has begun to shift from merely assigning tasks to designing how work is carried out.
It determines where technology is used, where a human is needed and where both must work together.
The problem is not the answer… but the judgment of it
One of the things that makes AI so convincing is that its outputs often look good. A tidy report, logical analysis, strong language, and a recommendation that seems confident. But we have all started to learn that a good-looking answer does not necessarily mean it is the correct or the most appropriate one.
Here, in my view, one of the most important managerial skills in the next phase emerges: professional judgment.
They know when to trust the director, when to review them and when to say: No, that solution is logical on paper but not suitable for the context.
Because artificial intelligence may know a great deal of information, but it does not live the organization’s culture, does not know every detail of the team, and does not always understand the impact of a decision on the people behind the numbers.
It may present options. But the choice itself remains the responsibility of the human.
And who is responsible if artificial intelligence makes a mistake?
And that’s a question I think we will hear more often in the coming period. If an employee makes a mistake on a task, the manager can understand the reason, review the thinking process, provide feedback, and help the employee learn.
But if the error came from an AI tool, can we say, “it’s the one that said that”?
Of course not.
And for me this is a very important principle: delegating a task to artificial intelligence does not mean delegating responsibility.
As long as a human is the one who uses the output or makes a decision based on it, they remain responsible for the review, the understanding and the final result.
This may be one of the points we need to start discussing more with managers: artificial intelligence may help you with the decision, but it does not remove the responsibility for the decision from you.
Maybe the leadership itself must be more humane.
The irony is that the more AI becomes stronger in analysis and execution, the more some human skills will become important.
- If technology can analyze information quickly, the manager needs to be better at asking questions.
- If you can produce many solutions, the manager needs to be better at choosing.
- If they can execute a large part of the tasks, the manager needs to be better at understanding people, developing them, and building trust with them.
And that made me think of something simple: if artificial intelligence saves a manager two hours of operational work, I wonder what they will do with those two hours.
I hope they don’t use them to do more operational work. Perhaps it’s better to use some of them to talk with their team, listen to them, understand their challenges, develop them and be more present with them, because these are among the things that technology still will not replace easily.
The role of learning and development also changes here.
And that, of course, raises an important question for me as a learning and development specialist: do current manager development programs actually prepare them for this stage?
It may no longer be enough to just teach the manager how to delegate or provide feedback. We also need to help them think of new questions:
- What can be delegated to artificial intelligence and what must remain with humans?
- How does one review the outputs?
- How does his team prevent full reliance on him?
- How can they maintain learning and build experience?
- And how can it ensure that speed and efficiency do not come at the expense of decision quality or the human dimension?
I think it's not just technical skills. It has started to become part of the meaning of leadership itself.
In the end
Some time ago, we were talking about artificial intelligence as a tool.
After that we began talking about him as an assistant.
Today we see it moving gradually toward implementing full tasks and work streams.
And because of that, perhaps the question we need to ask managers is no longer: How do you use artificial intelligence?
But: how do you lead work when artificial intelligence is present?
I believe the future manager will not necessarily be the person who knows how to use the greatest number of tools. It will be the person who knows when a human is needed, when to use artificial intelligence, and when to make the two work together.
Because artificial intelligence could become a new member of the team, but leadership will remain a human responsibility.