How AI Will Groom A New Breed of ‘Super Managers’

MEET THE AI POWERED ‘SUPER MANAGER’

As automation liberates leaders from administrative chores, new opportunities emerge

Brienne Ghafourifar, co-founder of the AI technology firm Entefy, believes that super managers will integrate three distinct roles — Empathetic Mentor, Data-Driven Decision Maker and Creative Innovator — into a single position.

When executives talk about how managerial roles are changing in the new era of artificial intelligence (AI), what most are really talking about is time. 

Consider that business managers currently spend 54% of an average work day on administrative chores such as scheduling, budgets and reports, according to an Accenture survey in the Harvard Business Review. They spend just 10% on strategic planning and even less, 7%, engaging one-on-one with their direct reports—two tasks that are key to managerial success.

A growing number of AI applications, however, promise to drastically reduce business leaders’ workloads by taking over many of those low-value and repetitive tasks. By 2021, this shift will generate an estimated $2.9 billion in business value and save 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity, according to Gartner. 

The upshot: Managers will have more time to perform more valuable work. At the same time, they will be expected to move faster, fueled by data-driven insights for strategic decision making, and lead more effectively with the aid of AI-powered tools that can streamline productivity.

Brienne Ghafourifar, co-founder of the AI technology firm Entefy, aims to help managers find that productivity sweet spot as AI gains traction in the workplace. Entefy is one of dozens of startups taking on Google, Microsoft and others with AI applications that strive to give companies’ most valuable asset—people—a competitive edge. 

Ghafourifar spends a lot of time thinking about how AI can empower managers of the future, and believes it will require folding three distinct roles—Empathetic Mentor, Data-driven Decision Maker and Creative Innovator—into a single position.

“The average manager won’t need to inhabit all three roles,” she explains, “but a ‘super manager’ should and will.” Here’s a more detailed look at each of these roles.

Empathetic Mentor

As AI automates more routine tasks, managers and employees will increasingly rely on “soft skills” such as emotional intelligence, creativity and critical problem solving. As a result, managers will need to hone their skills assessment expertise, identifying individual team members’ strengths and weaknesses. 

Diagnostic AI software may help them monitor workers’ job performance and engagement, but the human element needed to deploy that data artfully will be empathy.
“AI can provide insights into worker productivity that managers didn’t have access to before,” Ghafourifar says. “They can understand employees’ performance and their morale. But at the end of the day, it comes down to people’s ability to empathize with their employees.”

Among the areas where super managers will need to engage their teams empathically is the adoption of AI tools themselves. A recent Adobe survey of U.S. workers found that more than 70% of respondents currently don’t feel equipped to leverage AI as part of their jobs.
Good managers will need to understand that anxiety and help their teams adopt new tech tools. “At the very least, they’ll need to connect the dots between what an AI platform can do and how those functions correspond to the team’s goals,” Ghafourifar notes. 

How well managers understand how AI works will also be a key differentiator in super managers’ effectiveness as leaders, says Sam Ransbotham, an associate professor at Boston College Carroll School of Business. “Everyone doesn’t have to know everything about AI, but managers should understand what it can and can’t do,” he says. “Only by knowing about these technologies can people make a savvy critique of what is possible and what isn't possible, what’s worth it and what’s not.”

Even if they can’t train algorithms themselves, managers need to understand when, how and why to use them—and to communicate that knowledge to their teams. 

Data-Driven Decision Maker

Even today, the amount of data available to managers is staggering, and it is poised to grow exponentially in the coming years. This data explosion will present both opportunities and challenges for business leaders, and tomorrow’s super manager will navigate both to make the best data-driven decisions possible.

“AI is going to augment human capabilities. We’ll replace the redundant tasks, but the human element is still there. Now we can spend more of our time on things that require more creativity.”

Brienne Ghafourifar

Chief among the opportunities? Predictive analytics will arm managers with more insights about the competitive landscape, shifting customer demographics and preferences, and likely return on investment based on future trends.

“More data helps us make better decisions. If you’re a good manager, you would generally be in a better position to make better decisions with more data,” says Ghafourifar.
But the coming avalanche of data poses dangers as well. The insights generated by AI will only be as good as the data fed into algorithms. It will take a super manager to accurately assess data’s value based on their knowledge and judgment. 

“Data will not be perfect,” says Ransbotham. “It’s going to be inherently flawed. The human role is knowing what the limitations are of the inputs to the AI because you will never have perfect information going in.”

Another risk for managers across industries is potential overreliance on AI—a risk that is all too real as algorithms take on the ability to make decisions themselves. The World Economic Forum reports that by 2025, automation will handle about 28% of the task hours spent on decision making. It’s a slippery slope that Ghafourifar trusts super managers won’t stumble down.

“As a manager, of course I could look at raw output and go with a decision the machine is recommending,” she says. “But it’s on the human to do the analysis.”

Creative Innovator

The optimistic take on the future is that by giving managers, and their teams, more time and smarter resources, new technologies will unleash a wave of innovation. Ghafourifar herself is bullish on this outcome.
“AI is going to augment human capabilities,” she says. “We’ll replace the redundant tasks, but the human element is still there. Now we can spend more of our time on things that require more creativity.”

But a less rosy view is that even with the most advanced AI tools, not every manager will be the next Steve Jobs.

“The truth is that many companies today have managers who are not strategic,” says Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of business psychology and chief talent scientist at ManpowerGroup. “They might be good at performing daily tasks, but if you ask them, ‘Where is the company going? How are you preparing for the future?’, many are just clueless.”

Super managers will be those who can leverage AI to distill complex ideas, identify hidden patterns and plot strategies to gain a competitive edge. But tech won’t magically unleash their full potential. In the end, skill, grit and talent will determine which managers thrive in this evolving ecosystem.

“People who have invested in learning about AI and built that foundation will be able to use it better,” Ransbotham says. “That’s been true of every technology in the history of mankind. Why would this one be any different? You can hand two people a hammer, and people who know what to do with it can build something. People who don’t can just break things.”
CREDITS: Nazar Abbas Photography/Getty

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