Question: What is the career risk to “Management Professionals” in the age of AI (artificial intelligence)?
My Response: Management cannot be automated out, because its construct is multi-dimensional, unbounded by the rituals and liturgies of computer codes. Yes, management, as a profession or role, will always be here. Nonetheless, management systems and processes will evolve as digital platforms emerge, and penetrate, across sectors and markets. How you run Amazon will be different from how you run GE; Amazon is natively digital, and GE is not. The key to career preservation is having the management skills necessary in an era. It could look simple but how a digital manager reads balance sheets and P&L differs from what a fast food manager does! You may be surprised that the former has set its Profit/Loss line to red for years while the latter is sure of gray or thick black in months.
Note: there are many elements to management. I noted the redesign AI will bring in a recent article in Harvard Business Review.
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Management as a profession will always be here, you cannot automate it, someone must provide leadership, else there would be perpetual chaos all over the place. You can automate processes, not people, even when there is change of rules on the former, you still need humans to update them; so there will always be something to manage.
The only miscalculation is to assume that what produced great results in the past would be good enough to keep you afloat, when repeated – going forward. That’s why your wonderful past track records leading traditional organisations may not get you decent wins in digital companies; that misalignment is what will keep some professionals out of business anyway.
Since it’s impossible to guarantee that all men and women will be of good behaviour, even God cannot guarantee that all his creatures would behave well; it means management cannot be avoided. As long as self-governance is not scalable, professional managers will remain in business!
” As long as self-governance is not scalable, professional managers will remain in business!” – I agree with you on that line