Last month, a friend told me that by the end of the year, his startup will have seven employees and over 20 AI agents. He has led several previous successful organizations and has a reputation as a wonderful people manager. Yet he felt unmoored imagining how to maintain a tightly cohesive team in an organization where AI will have a large presence. 

He’s not alone in what he’s feeling. When we delegate increasingly significant tasks to AI agents, or welcome their presence and input in team channels, we allow them (knowingly or not) to profoundly influence our decision-making and relationships at work. We need a way to steer that wisely. 

The good news is that we can proactively manage AI as a powerful collaborator without giving it the status (or indeed, the dignity) of a human teammate. In fact, getting productive outcomes from AI at work depends on finding this new way forward: one in which the presence of technology is intentionally harnessed to unlock the potential of our human colleagues. 

Leading ethical and humane use of AI at Salesforce has given me insight into thousands of companies’ adoption efforts. Research for my book Manage the Machine helped me make sense of what I learned. Here are four early principles for navigating the challenge.

You wouldn’t open a new store and not put a manager in charge of it, nor would you hire a new employee and give them no one to report to. And yet, many companies have simply given workers AI tools capable of executing highly consequential tasks without being clear who answers for results.

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