Introduction

Well, good evening, everyone. My name is Stefano. I'm Head of Community and Partnerships at Mindstone.

And I need to admit that I'm a bit nervous today. So I've done this before, as you can imagine.

We have 20 locations around the world. But it's the first time that I do this in London.

So I feel like I'm coming home, but a home where I've not been. So I'm really excited. And I look forward to sharing this talk with you today.

Framing the Question: How AI Changes Management

Now, the title is on the slide, how will AI change the role of the manager? And I think that Melanie has set up the scene very well because after looking at that demo, you might be wondering, all right, if agents can do that sort of thing, what is it that the manager should do?

Speaker Background and Perspective

And to answer this question, I will try to bring in three different professional working lives. And I don't like to talk about myself generally, but I think this is good background for what you will see.

So my first was as an economist in the private sector here in London, just around the corner, not too far, in Holborn. Then after that, I moved to the OECD in Paris, where I was helping governments and educational institutions to think about the future of work.

And then, of course, the future happened. the future came to life or started to come to life three years ago and that's when ChartGPT came of age and so I started working at MindStone and I'm now working as the head of community in a role where I manage all the organizers around the world and I make sure that events like this one today happen.

And so the answer is in this picture which is AI generated.

A Historical Lens on Management Roles

And so what I will try to show today is that I will take a historical perspective. We will try to look at what happened in the past and how we can inform the future.

From Captain to Conductor to Coach-Architect

And we will see that the manager has moved from being a captain and a navigator in the pre-computer era to being an orchestra director. in the 1980s and 1990s where computers came of age and is now going to become a coach and an architect.

Bear with me, we will get to the conclusion step by step.

So these slides are made on Gamma. How many of you have heard of Gamma or used Gamma before?

Okay. Yeah, Josh, thank you.

So I will also, as we go through, if there is a slide that you don't like, raise your hand, and I will change it on the spot.

All right, all ready. All right.

Why Managers and Organizations Exist

Now, as we get started, very basic but important question. Why do managers and organizations exist? Why do we have organizations in the first place? Why do we have managers?

Any takers? Yes? Reduce transaction costs. Beautiful. And some economics training is showing up there.

To organize work that will be achieved by the collection of... OK, organize the work. Great. And that's the idea of the orchestra director, so hold that thought.

Yes? Increase the profit. Increase the profit. So you're thinking about the outcomes. So interesting. Something about the input, something about the output here.

Knowledge Hierarchies and Complex Problem-Solving

I think I want to share with you a framework that It's been quite common in the industrial organization literature of the 80s and 90s, which is the idea of knowledge hierarchies. So the idea is that we have organization because, quite simply, some problems are very difficult to solve. And people coming together solve them better than people working as freelancers or contractors.

And in this, of course, complex problems require information, so the organization really becomes a tool, a set of structures and processes to distribute that knowledge effectively.

If you think about a retail store, a retail store fundamentally is doing two things. It's understanding what kind of products people need at a certain point in time. So the entire organization is set up to solve that problem.

Where do managers come in? 1Managers typically intervene when the system fails. So they are managers by exception.

Technology, Information, and Organizational Design

Now, what's the relationship between technology and management? Well, technology changes the availability of information. We have better or quicker access to data.

As the availability of information is changing, the job profiles and the organizational structure is changing. And so the responsibilities of individuals and employees change.

Is this making sense? Yeah.

Pre-Computer Era: The Manager as Team Captain

Now, what happens before computers are around? There isn't that much information to go by. There are few data points to actually make decisions.

So decision making is intuitive. It's based on experience and gut feeling.

And the manager is really, you should think about the manager as a team captain. Like someone who is navigating the team through this scarce information landscape. No radar, no precise instruments, a compass, and a lot of intuition.

What does it mean in practice? All right.

A Day in the Life: Paolo, 1960s Store Manager

Let's think about Paolo, store manager in an Italian village in the 60s. How is his daily job looking? What is he actually doing?

Is he going through paper records, going around the store, looking at which shelves are being empty at different points in time?

problems come out, it would try to figure out the best solution, giving guidance to the team. So, it's really fitting, this idea of the captain.

Computer and Internet Era: The Manager as Orchestra Director

Now, what happens with computers?

Finally, we have readily available knowledge. The knowledge is there. Computers are gathering it, or some computerized systems are gathering it, and we can use them to process it.

And so decision-making becomes more analytical, and then all the managers shift, like an orchestra director, to bring together all these different information data points and ensure that people are making use of it in the best possible way.

Elena in the 1980s: KPIs and Fair Coordination

What would Paolo's daughter Elena do in the 1980s?

So she's probably looking at some KPIs in some reports on a screen or on paper. Given that KPIs, it's assigning tasks to the different team members and it's ensuring that the decision-making process and the task allocation is perceived as fair by everyone involved.

Connectivity and the Rise of Omni-Channel Complexity

You might wonder, how does the internet change this? So when internet comes about, the store is connected to the center, real time. So a lot of decisions are actually being taken by the center as opposed to the individual store in a chain at least.

And then e-commerce is introduced. And this, especially in the advent of e-commerce, causes a headache for managers because they find themselves to have to manage this omni-channel model.

And so with people coming at random times to pick up deliveries or objects and having to manage goods that they bought, so having to manage that flow. of customers, so there is even a stronger focus on this enhanced coordination.

AI Era: The Manager as Coach and Architect

Now, what happens in the AI era? Yeah, it's a puzzling picture, right? Because I think the role of the manager is puzzling.

So here I've got half, and this is AI-generated, I've got half of a coach and half of an architect, which I think really show the two souls or the two different sets of skills that the manager will need.

So designing or supervising, systems where AI and humans work together, 1and then, as generally I think, the team size will be decreasing, rather than coordinating the team, focusing on coaching every single employee and make them as good as they can possibly be.

Using AI Tools to Define Modern Retail Management

Now, I'm actually going to, so I created to tell you what skills or to discuss the skills that are needed by a retail manager or the role of the retail manager, I'm actually going to use a custom GPT that I created.

So I put all the information of the talk, I put all the information of the talk on a custom GPT, just a little bit what Melanie just showed, but with all the information, the talk, the script, the slides, and academic paper that I used to prepare it, and so it can give me feedback in real time.

Can you describe a role of the retail manager in the AI era? Let's correct the grammar there. So I'm using a simple model here because I actually want the answer to come out quickly. The question is quite simple.

What AI Assists With vs. What Managers Enable

So you see that it's coming up with the coach architect metaphor. And then it's telling me what AI assistance can do, forecast demand, schedule staff, personalize offers. And that, tying back to what we were saying, the manager would spend less on monitoring and more time on designing the systems and mentoring the humans.

And that's pretty much, well, The AI Assistant is just on the chatbot, as just said.

Key Takeaways and Closing

Now, if we were to think about three takeaways from this, three things that you take away from this talk.

Three Core Lessons

First, that managers reflect their information system. As the availability and quality of information changes, so changes the role of the manager. Then we have seen this evolution in the role of the manager from leading, this idea of the leader, to coordination and now to enabling people and systems.

And what this enablement will require is a combination of skills that I think is unlikely and really needs to be fostered through education which is understanding of technology and how it fits in people's lives and coaching of individuals.

Q&A

I hope this was interesting. I'm really happy to take some questions.