AI for Managers: Real Examples, Real Impact

I recently commented on a Reddit post where a manager asked if any other leaders were actually using AI day-to-day. Agentic AI is getting plenty of attention for how it's transforming work for individual contributors - writers, analysts, developers - but what about us? My response was simple: Every. Single. Day. Multiple times a day. Unfortunately for leaders, practical guidance is surprisingly scarce.

It's basically gotten to the point where these tools have gone from being a force multiplier to an essential part of my daily professional life. They give me hours of my day back and help maximize the value of everything I produce.

A critical distinction: where we can take advantage of AI is as a writing, research, and collaboration partner, not as a ghostwriter. We provide the insights, the context, and the judgment. AI helps us articulate them faster and more clearly. This collaborative approach personifies the distinction between authentic leadership efforts and generic AI-generated slop.

Let's break down how AI delivers real impact across several key areas of our lives as leaders. (One quick note: I call my AI partners "Jarvis" - it's how I personify these tools, whether it's Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, or others. You'll see this name throughout.)

Research and Analysis

As leaders, our job is to set our teams up for success in engagements and partner across the organization on strategic decisions. Success in both depends on being prepared for every interaction - and teaching our teams to do the same. AI turns hours of prep work into minutes.

Customer research has never been easier, yet it remains the most underaccomplished task in any sales organization. Too often, we join prep calls without even knowing attendees' titles, much less their corporate strategy. Perplexity is my tool of choice here - it gathers and processes recent information while leaving a trail of breadcrumbs with suggested follow-up questions to guide your research. Other AI tools offer similar capabilities for analyzing publicly available information on businesses, industries, and individuals.

It's also been a decade since Gong transformed meeting analysis, and today many of these capabilities are integrated into Webex, Teams, Zoom, and other platforms. Now it's possible to understand a 90-minute meeting in under 10 minutes by asking Jarvis questions about the call. Start with questions like "Did we define an agenda?", "What questions did we ask?", "What was customer sentiment?", and "What were the next steps?" Then dig into what stands out. It's exponentially faster than listening to the full recording.

Talent Management

AI also transforms how we handle our most critical people management tasks. These tasks are often the ones we have the least time set aside for in our daily routines - reviews, promotion recommendations, interviews, etc. They're time-consuming, high-stakes, and often require perfect articulation. AI excels at helping with all three.

I was recently asked to interview a Head of Product candidate - my challenge was I'd never interviewed that type of role before. The solution? Describe to Jarvis the types of engagements my team would have with this role, plus areas where we had struggled to engage with Product in the past. Within minutes, we had a list of meaningful questions that got right to the heart of what mattered most for this new role.

The key to these tasks isn't letting AI develop content for you - it's feeding it the right information and working together to perfect it. Take another task I've struggled with over the years: performance reviews and promotion recommendations. It's taken me as long as 10 hours to perfect each review, ensuring my people receive credit for their efforts, get challenged appropriately on their growth areas, and finding the right words to justify a key promotion.

Today, the process is transformed. Start by setting your ideas down. Don't worry about exact words, list everything in freeform text or in bullets; whatever is natural to you. Now ask Jarvis to generate a draft. Here's the critical part: do NOT take that first draft as gospel. You're only halfway there. Review each sentence carefully to ensure the right emphasis and structure. Ask the AI for recommendations or to address concerns. This back and forth - using Jarvis as a writing partner rather than a ghostwriter - quickly turns your insights into valuable feedback for your employees and leadership.

The same approach works for job descriptions and interview questions. Seed the conversation with your views on actual responsibilities, problems that must be addressed by this role, and success criteria, then collaborate with the AI to develop the content. This turns a generic Project Manager req, for example, into a meaningful description that inspires the right candidates to apply.

3. Communications Management

Last week at our Sales Kickoff (SKO), people traveled across the country to be together for three days. With limited time together, I needed everyone arriving at our workshops already aligned and ready to contribute. But SKO prep comes with a hundred competing demands - how could I quickly create something meaningful to get people in the right headspace?

I laid out what needed to be accomplished and the current state in freeform text, then asked what questions Jarvis had. For the first workshop, it asked 12 questions that helped refine the topic, goals, and approach. With those answered, I asked what concerns or risks it saw, leading to even more clarifications. Once we both felt good about the situation, Jarvis generated a draft of a preread which we refined together. In about 30 minutes, we had a solid document that set the stage for my team. At SKO, several team members commented on how valuable these were for grounding them in the exercise.

Using Jarvis to assist in generating communications is invaluable not just for the time saving but also working through writer's block. There are some communications where it can be difficult to even get that first sentence in place…especially for sensitive or urgent topics.

Take a recent example: communicating a difficult personnel decision to the team. The emotions were high, the stakes were real, and finding the right tone was critical. I knew what I needed to say, but starting that first paragraph felt impossible. I outlined the key points for Jarvis - why the change was necessary, how the team would move forward, what the plan was - then asked it to help me draft something that was clear, respectful, and honest. The first draft wasn't quite right - the tone felt too corporate. We iterated. Better, but now it felt too casual given the gravity. We iterated again. It didn't need to be long, but it absolutely needed to be perfect. After several rounds, we had something that honored the situation and respected everyone involved.

Getting it right matters beyond just one email. These moments define how your team sees you as a leader and how they understand the organization's values. AI can't make these decisions or feel these emotions - but it can help you articulate what you already know needs to be said, when the weight of the moment makes it hard to find the right words.

Adopting AI Without Losing our Humanity

Probably the #1 fear among managers with these tools is losing what makes us...us. If an AI is writing our emails and documents, where do we add value? It doesn't help that much of the prevailing wisdom suggests AI replaces hard-earned experience and skill. My favorite example: "AI replaces the need to know how to code" - right up until you NEED to know how software actually works to progress. Then you're up a creek. The same applies here: AI can't replace our empathy, our wisdom, or our understanding of context. It's a tool to enhance and enable us, not a replacement.

And just like any tool, we must keep its limitations in mind. Jarvis makes mistakes and misunderstands situations. Recently, while helping me with video game strategy (yes, I'm a nerd), he accidentally combined advice from two completely different games. A content creator I follow posted a video showing an AI confidently inventing case law to support a legal argument - that didn't end well for those lawyers. AI makes mistakes and gets confused. Always verify its assertions, especially when stakes are high.

One critical consideration: privacy. There's an old internet adage - if you're not paying for a product, you ARE the product. It holds true here. Any "free" service is monetizing your data. For work purposes, I strongly recommend paid services, especially via your IT organization. Most run $10-$20 monthly and include meaningful privacy protections. More importantly, never feed AI tools confidential information, customer data, or proprietary details - regardless of whether you're paying without signoff from your IT and Security teams.

The Bottom Line

AI like my partner Jarvis can only enhance the leadership skills you bring to the table. It can't replace them. What it will do is give you back the time and mental energy to focus on what actually matters - the strategic decisions, the difficult conversations, the moments that require human inspiration.

The tools I've described aren't magic. They're force multipliers that handle grunt work so you can focus on tasks that takes your judgement and wisdom. Start small: pick one area from this post and experiment for a week. If you're having trouble getting started, pick customer research. It's the easiest to undertake and unlikely to run afoul of your IT organization. It can also help convince conservative security teams to approve broader AI adoption.

Fair warning: the first few times feel clunky. You're learning a new collaboration style. Give it a few tries. See what happens when you stop starting from blank pages and start collaborating instead.

Your team needs you at your best. AI can help you get there.

Fellow leaders: what other areas are you leveraging AI today, and what challenges have you faced with adopting it?