A New Study Suggests that AI is Capable of Taking Over Managerial Roles in Large-Scale Research Projects

A new study by ESMT Berlin shows that AI is taking over many key roles in a lot of organizations and it feels like AI is capable of doing tasks that require a lot of cooperation, allocation and motivation. There are many studies and researches talking about how AI is taking people’s jobs but now researchers have also found out that AI can work efficiently as a manager too. The researchers from ESMT studied AI not as a regular employee but as a manager. They found out that AI is good at managing tasks such as data collection and data analysis. Algorithm Management (AM) is a good example of it as it is changing the way research projects are being conducted.

The study published in Research Policy says that AI can not only take over the work of human managers, but can also do it way better than them. The researchers studied algorithm management and concluded that AI performs five most important functions that make it a good candidate for managerial positions. These functions included planning, organizing, coordinating, directing and support learning.

The researchers got to know more about the AI capabilities by discussing it with AI developers, project participants and interviewing some organizers. The aim of all of this was to understand how AM works and how much more effective it can be in management functions. It was soon found out that adopting AM can improve research productivity by managing large-scale and complex projects better than humans.

The study also found out that projects that use AM are larger than the projects that do not use AM. These projects also have access to AI tools so this means that AM requires technical infrastructure for the projects to scale. Even though AI can take over managerial roles, it doesn’t mean that roles and positions of managers in the companies are going to end. Managers and human leaders will still be required to make strategies and to perform social tasks that AI is still unable to do.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World