Good Use of AI Starts With Good Management

AI at work: building capability, trust and team confidence.

Most conversations about managers and AI focus on what AI gives back to the manager. Fewer meetings, faster reports, less time on scheduling and admin. The promise is that AI handles the routine so the manager can focus on what matters: strategy, culture, people.

That framing sounds right, but it misses the bigger shift. The managers who will get AI right are the ones who see it as a capability to build in the people around them.

Managers are pulling ahead of their teams

A July 2025 Gartner survey of nearly 3,000 employees found that 46 per cent of managers are already experimenting with AI to improve their work, compared with only 26 per cent of employees. Managers are pulling ahead. Their teams are falling behind.

The same research found that 86 per cent of managers face challenges driving effective AI use across their teams. They are adopting AI themselves, but they are struggling to help others do the same. A separate Gartner study of HR leaders found that only 7 per cent of organisations provide any guidance on how to use the time AI saves.

Managers have the tools. What they lack is a system for building capability in the people they manage. That gap defines the next phase of management.

The role is changing direction

The traditional management role pointed upward. Managers gathered information from their teams, aggregated it and reported it to leadership. AI compresses most of that work. What remains, and what grows, is the work that points downward and outward, helping people develop the capability to work with AI through the work itself.

In practice, this looks like a manager helping a team member identify where AI fits into a specific task, then reviewing the output together to build judgement about what AI does well and where it falls short. It looks like noticing when someone is using AI to shortcut quality versus when they are using it to reach a higher standard. It looks like designing team rhythms where AI-assisted work is reviewed, discussed and improved as a normal part of how the team operates.

This is management work. It requires proximity to the team, knowledge of the work and the judgement to know when to intervene. AI cannot do it.

Trust makes the difference

The shift only works if people feel safe enough to learn openly. A 2025 study by Henley Business School found that teams with the highest AI adoption rates had psychological safety scores in the top quartile. Teams with the lowest adoption had scores in the bottom quartile. The relationship was direct: where people felt safe to experiment, ask questions and admit uncertainty, AI became part of how the team worked. Where they did not, it stayed on the margins.

A parallel finding from MIT Technology Review Insights, based on a survey of 500 business leaders, showed that while organisations often promote a "safe to experiment" message publicly, deeper cultural undercurrents can counteract that intent. The gap between what organisations say about AI and what people experience when they try to use it is real. Managers sit in the middle of that gap.

Building trust around AI is specific work. It starts with being honest about what AI can and cannot do. Managers who treat early mistakes as learning rather than performance failures create room for experimentation. When someone can say "I tried this with AI and it didn't work" without consequence, the team learns faster.

This is uncomfortable for many managers. They are being asked to lead through a shift they are still figuring out themselves. The pressure to appear competent with AI while simultaneously learning it is real, and it sits alongside every other demand the role already carries. Acknowledging that discomfort openly, rather than performing confidence, is itself a trust-building act. These are management behaviours, and they are trainable, but very few organisations are training for them.

Capability is built through the work, not beside it

The shift is simpler than it sounds. Managers do not need to become AI experts. They need to create three conditions. First, giving people permission and time to experiment with AI inside their actual tasks. Second, building regular review into team workflows so that AI-assisted work is visible and improvable. Third, treating AI capability as something the team builds together rather than something each individual figures out alone.

The managers who do this well will find that AI does free up time. But the time is not freed by the tool. It is freed by the capability the team builds around it. When people know how to use AI well, they move faster, ask better questions and produce higher-quality work. The manager's job is to create the conditions for that capability to develop deliberately rather than hoping it emerges on its own.

The core of the role is expanding

AI will continue to change what managers do. Reporting will compress. Scheduling will automate. Data analysis will accelerate. But the core of the role is expanding. The work is becoming more human, centred on building capability, creating trust and helping people grow into new ways of working.

The managers who thrive will be the ones who see this as their job. The ones who struggle will be waiting for AI to do it for them.

Fahed Bizzari is an organisational AI strategist who argues that while most organisations have adopted AI, few have become empowered by it. He has over twenty years experience of helping organisations restructure how they work around technology. He is the Managing Partner of AI empowerment consultancy, Bellamy Alden, whose clients include L'Oréal, Fugro, Atlas Copco, Dubai Police and Shiseido. His work has been cited in Forbes, MIT Sloan Management Review and The National, and he is the author of the upcoming book AI Empowerment for Business Leaders (Rethink Press).

Sources

Gartner, "HR Survey: 45% of Managers Report AI Has Lived Up to Expectations," March 2026 (based on July 2025 surveys).

Henley Business School, "AI Adoption Study," 2025.

MIT Technology Review Insights, "Creating Psychological Safety in the AI Era," December 2025.

Topics:
• Career, Work and Identity