How AI could change team leading - bright future or dystopia?

 Let me start with a few arguments:

• Team leaders and team leading is a big expense for any organization
• Minimizing the cost of team leading can be done by:
• Maximising team sizes
• Adding ordinary work to team leaders
• Team leading is very valuable work, but it is usually not directly useful for the customers of the organization

Therefore looking at it purely financially the most efficient organisations are e.g. Bolt, Uber, Wolt and the likes where the people delivering the value to the customers don't have team leaders. A little bit less efficient are teams of (fast food) restaurants where the team-lead takes care of leading the team, but also cleans the tables or grills a hamburger if needed.

Now, with the emergence of AI we should think what are the tasks that team leaders are doing that could be perhaps given to AI and thus maximise team sizes and add "ordinary work" to team leaders.

Here are some thoughts:

- Recruiting: AI is already involved in various phases, but recruiting is such a big investment decision than here it is OK to use more team leader time

- On-boarding: This can almost totally be handled by self-service and AI help. Videos, instructions, chatbots could teach the new employee everything needed.

- Instructing how to do things: Again traditionally this is done by the leader, but many parts here can be substituted by AI, instruction material, trainings

- 1-on-1 meetings: Theoretically why not substitute half of these with an employee feedback system, that incorporates an AI chatbot that answers to employee questions or summarizes the feedback fo the team lead.

- Development and salary discussions: Probably cannot be totally substituted, but maybe can be made shorter or less frequent if there is an AI bot that first summarizes the ideas and thoughts of the employee.

- Communication and sharing information: Again videos, articles, together with chatbots can make this very efficient.

- Monitoring the delivery and results of the employees work: KPI systems, colleague feedback analyzed by AI.

- Solving problems, relations: again an AI chatbot therapist can perhaps save time in these

So welcome "self-service workplace" - a workplace where the team lead has e.g. 10min a month per employee and that is thus very efficient.

Now one might ask if this is something we want. Where is the human part of work if nobody has time for the busy employee? Indeed, the human side in the "self-service workplace" will be much-much smaller, but what would you choose from the following:

- A 100eur raise or 15min a week more time from your team lead?

- An AI bot that is always there with polite and helpful answers or an "always busy" team lead?

- Would you buy services from a company that is famous for being a human-centric workplace or the one that is 20% cheaper?

- Do you like internal-politics, polititians and ambitions or would you rather work with an AI that is a machine and does not care how much influence it has?

However, there is one thing where the "self-service workplace" would be really bad at. That is  implementing changes and solving unexpected problems. Yes, all the food couriers and restaurants are efficient, but they are so because they do just the one very concrete thing. If a restaurant needs to renovate the premises, change the menu, start organizing events or deal with the sudden sick-leave of the main cook then you need leaders who deal with this.

But workplaces where tens or hundreds of employees are doing the same job and where change is rare can win a lot of efficiency with AI and self-service tools for the employees.