Would having an AI boss be better than our current human bosses?

The added stress of managing 83 employees left Hannu Rauma feeling discouraged and frustrated.

“I was feeling distracted and frustrated by all the things that weren't going well between our teams,” said Rauma, who is based in Vancouver, Canada.

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

“When I was getting new clients, half of my mind was saying, 'This is going to fail,' and that killed my enthusiasm.”

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

AI Manager helps agency employees who work remotely and with flexible hours set schedules and plan their workload in advance.

AI will check employee hours, send deadline reminders and regular check-in messages, and log time spent with different clients so you can bill them accurately. AI will also make suggestions to improve your writing, answer questions about your work, and automatically update everyone's work progress in a central portal.

Rauma says the move to an AI manager has not only reduced stress, but also helped employees work faster and more productively. “We can now focus on growing the company and all the good things. I think we've definitely got more life,” he says.

Rauma adds that relationships with employees have also improved dramatically: “Before, I felt like we were father and son. Now we're on more equal footing. Before, it was just about solving problems. Now we have more comfortable discussions.”

But not everyone at Student Marketing Agency is using the AI ​​Manager yet: Rauma and 26 of the agency's 83 employees were actually participating in a study conducted by Inspira and researchers from Columbia University, Arizona State University, and the University of Wisconsin that compared the AI ​​Manager's performance to that of a human manager.

Participants were split into three groups: one group was coached by a human manager, another group was coached by an AI manager, and the third group was coached by both the AI ​​and a human manager.

The AI ​​manager achieved a 44% success rate in getting employees to plan their workday in advance and 42% success rate in motivating employees to log in on time. These figures were comparable to human managers, who achieved scores of 45% and 44% in these two areas.

However, when the AI ​​manager worked in tandem with a human manager, it achieved a 72% success rate in getting employees to schedule their work in advance, and on-time attendance rates increased to 46%.

Although the study is statistically small and concentrated on certain types of workers and sectors, the findings suggest some interesting implications for companies adopting AI tools.

While companies including UPS, Klarna and Dell have announced significant job cuts this year with the intention of replacing many jobs with AI, Paul Thurman, a professor at Columbia University in New York, argues that it would be a mistake to replace management roles entirely with AI.

“Middle management is the most important layer in any organization,” the business professor says. “When they start to turn over, it's disastrous. Employees don't feel continuity, they don't get mentoring or coaching. These are all human things that human managers do better than AI and should be the focus.”

Thurman added that AI can free managers from endless reminders and check-ins, allowing them to focus on more innovative ways of working. For example, managers can handpick project teams based on their individual skill sets, oversee briefs and hand off detailed management like deadlines to AI.

AI can also identify who on your team is lagging behind and needs closer human supervision, as well as targeting top talent who need extra recognition.

But he says companies should avoid AI managers becoming surveillance tools.

“You don't want to get to a point where you realize that not only are employees not showing up to work on time, but they're taking too long to eat lunch or not having enough of a salad. You don't want to go that far,” Thurman said. “You want to find the right way to encourage the right behavior.”

AI managers could also help “accidental managers” — people for whom management is not a natural skill, but who excel in their roles and end up managing people, says Tina Lerman, founder of London-based human resources consultancy HR Habitat.

“We did a survey to find out why people leave their jobs, and almost 100% of respondents said it was because of poor management.”

“Some of them said they didn't like the way they were being managed, but most said it was because they didn't know what was expected of them or if they were doing their job properly,” Rahman says.

“The AI ​​manager will likely be built to give the right instructions and provide complete transparency into requirements and outcomes. When people know what is expected of them, they are more likely to be productive.”

However, Rahman warns that excessive reliance on AI-based management will create an atmosphere in which companies only care about results and not about people.

“It's going to be very hard for a company to tell its employees they're going to introduce this cutting-edge AI system that's going to have total control over them and then, in the same breath, say, 'We care about your experience at work,'” she says.