What managers and team leads should be asking about AI

Q: Am I becoming too dependent on AI?

Dependency turns on whether you could still do the work without it, and whether you have checked recently. Frequency of use tells you nothing.

Q: How much should I use AI at work?

Nobody answers this with a number. The nearest useful answer is the dependency diagnostic: not how often, but whether you could still do it unaided.

Q: What should I never delegate to AI?

Anything where the deciding is the point, anything you could not verify, and anything where being the author is what the work is for.

Q: Should I tell people I used AI?

Open. The disclosure norms are forming now and will differ by context, so a considered position is worth having early.

Q: How do I get AI to challenge me rather than agree with me?

Ask rather than tell. Framing input as a statement raises agreement by about 24 percentage points, and you will prefer the version that flatters you.

Q: How do expert AI users work differently from beginners?

Longer-serving users iterate more and delegate less in one vendor dataset, whose authors say self-selection could explain it. Nobody has compared experts and beginners on the same tasks.

Q: When is AI augmenting me and when is it doing the work for me?

The distinction that decides whether capability grows or erodes.

Q: Should there be AI-free periods at work?

Yes, for a short named list of tasks. The FAA has asked pilots for manual practice since 2013, and the skill gaps measured in colonoscopy and school mathematics were found by removing the tool. No trial of scheduled AI-free periods in knowledge work exists.

Q: What makes a good question?

Investigable, not self-answering, consequential. Rothstein and Santana on question-asking as a method, and why a question is not a prompt.

Q: Does AI reduce creativity?

Individually it raises rated creativity. Collectively it narrows the range. Whether that generalises beyond creative writing is unknown.

Hirji, Rahim

Delegation, supervision and running a team where the first draft of everything arrives already written.

Of the 1245 questions on the questions map, these 127 are the ones managers and team leads have a specific reason to ask. 73 have a dedicated answer; the rest are partly answered or openly on the roadmap, and are marked as such rather than quietly dropped. Last reviewed: 13 October 2026 · Next review due: 13 October 2027.

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The 12 that matter most, with what the research says in one line.

AnsweredWho supervises work they cannot do themselves?
Supervision has become approval, and no management system in common use can tell the difference.
PartialHow do I decide what to automate?
Nine stages, and the question answered per stage rather than per tool.
PartialHow much verification is enough?
Verification is treated as administrative residue and priced accordingly, so it gets skipped rather than resourced.
AnsweredWhat is the verifier's discount?
Verification is skilled work priced as administrative residue, so organisations get less of it than they think they bought.
AnsweredShould juniors use AI at all?
Open, and the answer is almost certainly not a simple yes or no.
AnsweredHow do you develop juniors now?
By deciding which repetitions are development rather than cost. Most organisations have never made that distinction explicitly.
AnsweredWhat happens to middle management?
Open, and asked constantly. Middle management is where work is allocated and judgement is checked, which are the two functions AI touches most directly. Nobody has yet measured what happens to a layer whose main output was coordination.
AnsweredWho gets credit when AI helped?
Recognition follows visible output, and AI makes output cheap to produce and hard to attribute.
AnsweredHow do you brief a team when AI drafts everything?
Open. When the first draft is close to free, the brief carries more weight than it used to, because it becomes the main place where thinking is specified rather than assumed. What that means in practice has not been studied.
AnsweredShould I let an AI agent act on my behalf?
Not a trust question. What is the worst thing it can do before a human sees it, and can you live with that?
AnsweredWhat does an AI-capable manager do differently?
Not use the tools more. Six habits, each traced to a measured result: allocate the task before the tool, keep some work unaided, count disagreements, protect the rungs, read the source, treat confidence as a symptom.
AnsweredShould AI attend my meetings?
Depends whether the meeting produces a record or produces understanding. Most organisations apply one policy to both.