Would it be better to have an AI boss than the current human one?

With the stress of managing 83 employees, Hannu Rauma was feeling discouraged and frustrated.

“I was getting too caught up in all these things that were going wrong between the teams and I was feeling this frustration,” says Mr. Rauma, who is based in Vancouver, Canada.

He is a senior manager at a company called Student Marketing Agency, which hires university students to provide marketing support to small businesses.

“When I was bringing new clients on board, half of my mind would say, ‘we’re going to break,’ and that would dampen my enthusiasm.”

But Mr Rauma says that all changed last November, when the firm started using an autonomous AI manager developed by US-based company Inspira.

AI Manager helps agency workers, who work flexible hours remotely, set their schedules and plan their workloads in advance.

It checks their timekeeping, sends them reminders about deadlines and regular check-in messages, and records the time spent on different clients so that they can be billed accurately. AI also makes suggestions to improve the wording of written text, is available to answer work-related questions, and automatically updates everyone’s work progress on a central portal.

Mr. Rauma says that the shift to an AI manager has not only reduced his stress levels, but enabled his employees to work faster and be more productive. “I am able to focus on the growth of the company and all the positive things. Years have been added to my life, I’m sure,” he says.

Mr. Rauma adds that his relationship with his employees has also improved drastically. “Before, it felt very much like a father-son situation. Now, we are more on an equal footing. Before, it was just about solving problems. But now we are able to have easier discussions.”

But not everyone at Student Marketing Agency is using AI Manager yet. Mr. Rauma and 26 of his 83 employees were actually part of one STUDY led by Inspira and academics from Columbia University, Arizona State University and the University of Wisconsin to compare the AI ​​manager’s performance with its human counterparts.

Participants were divided into three groups: one led by a human manager, another by an AI manager, and the final group by an AI and human manager.

AI Manager achieved a 44% success rate in getting employees to plan their workdays in advance and was able to motivate employees to check in on time 42% of the time. These figures were comparable to the human manager, who achieved results of 45% and 44% for these two areas.

However, when the AI ​​manager worked in partnership with a human manager, together they achieved a 72% success rate in getting employees to plan their workdays in advance and managed to achieve a 46% on-time success rate.

Although the study is statistically small and focused on a specific type of employee and field, its results point to interesting implications for companies introducing AI tools.

While businesses like it UPS, Klarna, vein and others have announced significant job cuts this year, with the aim of replacing many roles with AI. Prof Paul Thurman, of Columbia University in New York, argues that replacing management roles entirely with AI would be a mistake.

“Middle management is the most critical layer in any organization,” says the management professor. “They’re layers that, if it starts to turn, you’re in for a wild ride. Your people don’t see continuity, they don’t get mentoring and coaching… all the human things that human managers are better at than AI and should focus on.”

AI, Prof Thurman adds, can free managers from endless reminders and checks to focus on more innovative ways of working. For example, managers can select project teams based on individual skill sets, oversee the brief, and then hand it over to their AI to manage details like deadlines.

AI can also identify who on the team is lagging behind and may need to be managed more closely by a human, and similarly, hone in on star performers who require additional recognition.

But companies should move away from AI managers becoming a surveillance tool, he says.

“You don’t want to get to a point where you’re noticing that, not only are people not on time, they’re taking too long at lunch and not eating enough salad. You don’t want to go that far,” says Prof Thurman. “You want to 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, says Tina Rahman, founder of London-based HR consultancy. , HR Habitat.

“We did a study that looked at the reasons why people leave their jobs. Almost 100% of respondents said it was due to poor management.

“Some of them said they didn’t like the way they were managed, and most of them also said it was because they didn’t know what was expected of them or if they were doing a good job,” says Ms Rahman. .

“You would assume that an AI manager would be built to provide those precise instructions, to provide full transparency on requirements and results. People are likely to be more productive when they know what is expected of them.”

But an over-reliance on AI management sets the tone that companies only care about the product and not the people, warns Ms Rahman.

“It’s going to be very difficult for a business to tell their employees that they’re introducing this brand new AI system that’s going to completely manage them, then say, with the same face, that ‘we we care about your experiences in the workplace,'” she said.

However, perhaps the biggest concern for AI managers is not from a people perspective, but from a cybersecurity perspective, warns James Bore, managing director of cybersecurity consultancy Bores, and speaker and author.

“If you have an AI manager and you’ve given them all the company’s processes, procedures and intellectual property that’s suddenly all in software, it can be hijacked by someone who wants to clone it, and it can also be held for ransom. ,” says Mr. Bore.

“If you start relying on it, which companies will when they start replacing humans with AI, you’re kind of stuck, because you have no sustainability, no option to go back to humans, because you have no I have more.”

Rather than companies becoming more efficient through the widespread use of AI, Mr Bore says there may be an unintended consequence beyond reliance on systems that can fail.

“The more you automate and the more you remove people from your business, yes, you will reduce costs. But you’ll also make your company more replaceable.”