Introduction

I was planning to show you first the presentation and then how I got to it, but as we are short on time, I will do a little bit of both. So from time to time I will stop and we will look at how Gamma works and the process that I followed to prepare this presentation.

So I think it's gonna be interesting for you to see how I'm thinking about this these days.

Setting the stage

This is a special presentation for me because it's bringing together two moments of my life. It's bringing together the present with the past.

And the present is, of course, the head of community and partnerships for Mindstone.

The past was working as an education expert, as an economist for the OECD in Paris, for a consulting company in London. And my job used to be to help mainly governments, but also corporations, to think about the future of work.

Now, of course, I got bored and decided to make the future of work happen. But that economics expertise and that skills expertise is still very much with me.

And so what I'm trying to do today is to bring the past and the present together.

The Role of AI in Management

And so I will try to tell you how I think the AI will change the role of the manager.

And it follows, I couldn't think about a better thought than what Augustus gave before I started speaking, because it sort of shows the importance of combining agents in a workflow, which is going to be a very important role for the manager.

The answer is in this picture that you see there, which is AI generated. Before computers, we have got the manager as a captain, as a strategist.

After computers, the manager as an orchestra director, and with AI, the managers as a coach and architect. So let me walk through your reasoning and how this makes sense.

Understanding the foundation of management

So first, why do organizations exist and why do managers exist? Any takers on this? Anyone who wants to answer the question?

To coordinate. To coordinate. Any more takers? Accountability and responsibility. Very good.

So an old field of industrial organization literature that I followed closely and my professor at the university subscribed to, thinks about organizations as structures that bring information together and that solve problems. So think about a retail supermarket. What is a supermarket doing?

Supermarketing, in a sense, is making sure that the right products are going to the right people at the right time. So having an organization allows to have an efficient system to distribute information and to tackle challenges that we would not be able to tackle on our own. So the manager needs to supervise this whole information system and intervene when things are not working.

So there is this whole idea about management by exception. A manager intervenes if the system fails.

Impact of technology on management

Now, how does technology change management then?

So technology influences the availability of information. So we have computers, now we can process a lot of data and generate some insights.

In turn, this changes the organizational structure with new job profiles being introduced and others disappearing and It changes the tasks that people need to do, both employees and managers.

And so they're all the manager.

Management before computers

Let's think about what would happen before computers. So it's a world of very limited information and decision-making needs to be intuitive. There are very few data that you can go by.

There is no spreadsheet that you can look at. And so the manager, needs to focus on guiding the team and help the team navigate through this scarce information. So the manager is, in a sense, a strategist, a captain.

Let's think about an example. So I'm really affectionate to this picture because it took me a while to get it right. This is Paolo, a store manager in the 60s.

What would be his responsibilities? Going around the store, ensuring, gathering some intel on how things are working, going through some paper, and finding out solutions. But these are mainly based on his gut feeling on what's happening. And when there are problems, giving guidance to the team.

Now, by the way, assume we don't like Paolo. and we want to change Paolo. So you will get a sense of how Gamma works.

So you see the interface? So you can go here, and you see this is all inbuilt. How about, We change the gender. So female. So I've just changed the gender here. And I can choose through different models. But this gives you a sense of how gamma works.

I don't know if this is going to work, by the way. I've not tried before. It's a live demo. Things might go wrong.

What do we think? What do we think? And I can also change the style, by the way. Who wants to see a different art style? What do we like? Make it look like an impressionist painting from the 19th century with a blue to green color palette.

So I'm using an app to dictate, which is called Super Whisper. I'm not sure you've seen it before, but I found it very useful. So again, I'm not sure how this will go. But it gives you an idea of what's possible with gamma.

This is really interesting. I think I've really seen the change. What I had before was oil on canvas. This is more impressionist looking. It gives you a sense of what's possible just live and how much freedom it can give you to change things.

Now, where were we?

Management after the advent of computers

Now, computers come. What happens with computers? Well, there is this world of structured information now, a digital system to organize knowledge. So decision making becomes more analytical.

But of course, all these numbers and these informations quite simply needs to be crunched, needs to be looked at. And so the manager is not more of a captain. He's more of an orchestra director. needs to coordinate people, as someone said.

So we meet Elena. We can think about her as Paolo's daughter. How is she spending her days?

KPI monitoring, so monitoring the KPIs that are coming through, allocating tasks, and ensuring that everyone on board The idea here is that all of a sudden there is this information that is available, but it needs to be processed.

Why is it that with digital technologies there is so much emphasis on soft skills? Because people need to work together to make sense of this information. Before, discussions were a bit more arbitrary and sterile because it was my gut feeling against yours. Now we have data that can be processed and discussed.

Management in the era of AI

Now, what happens with AI? So with AI, I'm trying to show this properly.

Well, there is a lot of information available now, and the cost of processing is really low. So the manager doesn't need to focus too much on coordinating people to extract value from this information. But it needs to do two things very well, I think.

1First, and this is the architect part, designing or supervising systems where AI and humans work together. And I've not said engineer, but architect. So what is it that people do, and what is it that these systems can do?

And then there is the coaching. Team size would generally go down, so I can spend more time as a manager with my employees to ensuring that they are using the tools in the right way and they are using their soft skills with the customers or internally in the most productive fashion.

Now, Paolo's granddaughter is Chiara. What is she doing?

She would, when she's in a retail store as a store manager, she would use AI system for forecasting and scheduling. She then needs to understand how this system fits, how they would fit within the store and used by the customers or by, sorry, by the employees or the customers.

And then she needs to coach the employees or she has more time now to coach the employees on how to do their job properly with these systems and with the customers in the store.

Conclusion

So three points to conclude.

So managers reflect the information ecosystems. As the availability of information changes, the organization changes, and the role of the manager changes. And there has been an evolution in the role

from just leading to coordinating and now, I think, to enabling systems and people. And the last point is that in the era of AI, this will require difficult combinational skills. Being a little bit of an architect and a coach, we go back to that segmented picture with the left-hand side being a coach and an architect and the right-hand side being a coach.

I hope this was useful and I'm happy to take any questions you may have. Actually, one or two because then we go for the pizzas.