AI Makes Good Management More Important
What Harvard and Stanford research reveals about why human judgment still matters, and why it needs better systems to scale.
Published
January 16, 2026
AI makes good management more important
AI makes good management more important
AI is suddenly everywhere at work. It writes drafts, summarizes meetings, analyzes data, and suggests what to do next. A lot of companies are rushing to adopt it.
But something interesting is happening along the way. Instead of making leadership easier, AI is making one thing clearer: how people make decisions and work together matters more than ever.
Two recent perspectives, one from Harvard, one from Stanford point to the same idea from different sides: AI is powerful, but without the right setup around it, it doesn’t actually make work better.
People don’t want AI to take over. They want it to help
People don’t want AI to take over. They want it to help
Stanford looked at what workers actually want from AI. The answer is pretty practical:
People want AI to:
handle repetitive tasks
find information faster
help them make better decisions
They don’t want:
to lose control over their work
to be told what to do by a black box
or to clean up after tools they don’t understand
In short, people want support, not replacement. That already shows a problem many companies run into.
If AI gives suggestions but no one owns the decision…
If insights sit in one tool and the real work happens in another…
If context stays in people’s heads…
AI doesn’t simplify work. It just adds another layer.
Technology isn't the hard part
Where things usually break
Turning AI into something teams can use
Turning AI into something teams can use
This is exactly the problem we kept running into when talking to teams.
Not that they lacked the tools or know-how. But that important things kept slipping through the cracks:
decisions made on Monday were forgotten by Thursday
priorities looked different depending on who you asked
meetings produced agreement, but not follow-through
AI tools generated insights that no one quite knew how to use
Work wasn’t failing because people were careless. It was failing because there was no shared place where decisions, ownership, and progress actually lived together.
That’s why we started building our Intelligent Management System.
Not as “another tool" and not as a layer of reporting on top of work.
But as a simple idea:
One shared, living view of what the organization is trying to get done – and who is responsible for what, right now.
In practice, that means:
decisions don’t disappear after meetings
priorities are visible to everyone involved
progress isn’t hidden in slide decks or Slack threads
AI suggestions show up in context, next to real work and real owners
For us, IMS isn’t about controlling work. It’s about removing the constant low-grade stress of not quite knowing:
Are we aligned?
Did we actually decide this?
Who owns the next step?
Are we drifting off track?
When that clarity exists, AI becomes genuinely helpful. Without it, AI just adds more output to an already noisy system.
Human skills don’t scale on their own
Human skills don’t scale on their own
Harvard talks a lot about human skills being more important in the AI age. That’s true. But skills alone don’t spread automatically.
Without a system:
good judgment stays with individuals
context gets lost
responsibility becomes fuzzy
teams repeat the same conversations
A system like IMS helps turn those human skills into something the whole organization can use:
decisions don’t vanish
priorities stay visible
coordination becomes routine
AI has context to work with
AI shows what’s already broken
AI shows what’s already broken
AI is a bit like turning up the lights, it makes existing problems easier to see:
messy handovers
unclear ownership
misaligned teams
weak routines
Companies with clear ways of working feel helped by AI and companies without them feel overwhelmed. The difference isn’t how smart people are, it’s whether the work itself is organized.
Takeaway
Takeaway
Stanford shows that people want AI to help, not take control. Harvard shows that leadership is still about human judgment. Put together, the message is simple:
AI makes good management more important, not less. An Intelligent Management System isn’t about replacing people. It’s about giving people a clear way to decide, coordinate, and move forward, with AI supporting them along the way.
That’s when AI actually becomes useful. Not when it takes over work. But when it helps people do the right things right.
References
https://www.harvardbusiness.org/insight/climbing-the-high-summits-why-every-leader-must-master-human-skills-to-get-the-most-out-of-ai/
https://hai.stanford.edu/news/what-workers-really-want-from-artificial-intelligence