Welcome to AI Signal, a new weekly edition of our newsletter for leaders navigating AI’s impact on people, policies, and work. Each week, we’ll take one important shift in AI and unpack what it means — one signal, one leadership implication, and no noise.
First up this week: managers. They're the people increasingly expected to turn AI strategy into reality. But are leaders asking them to guide an AI transformation they haven't been equipped to navigate?
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When AI Adopters Become Problems
I want to focus today on a group of people that, at some point in your career, you have found yourself a part of. I'm talking about managers.
The average manager's team grew from 10.9 to 12.1 direct reports in the past year alone, a nearly 50% increase since Gallup first started tracking this in 2013. Fewer layers, wider spans of control, and the people holding those teams together are absorbing the difference with less training and less support than the role requires.
At the same time, most organizations are pushing AI adoption down through those same managers, measuring success by how fast their teams pick up the tools.
Those two pressures are colliding in a way that's easy to miss from the boardroom and impossible to miss from the floor.
The Tension
As Meagan Bond recently spoke about on the People Managing People podcast, managers with the highest AI adoption rates who aren't developing their people generate more burnout across their teams than managers who ignore AI entirely.
Across organizations actually deploying AI in HR functions, the gains aren't coming from the controversial use cases like candidate-screening algorithms, but from the unglamorous ones. Maybe it's flagging payroll anomalies before they become errors, or routing support tickets, automating onboarding sequences, and surfacing compliance risks in documentation.
Agentic AI extends this further, orchestrating multi-step workflows with minimal prompting. A compliance check that used to take three handoffs and two days can resolve before anyone opens their inbox.
Why This Matters
The people function has spent years being asked to prove its business value. This is the moment to flip that. The real strategic risk in most AI rollouts isn't the technology, it's the erosion of the managers holding the org chart together, and HR is the only function positioned to see that erosion before it shows up in attrition data.
More than half of managers globally have never received formal management training, according to Gallup. Layer expanded teams and AI transformation pressure on top of that foundation and you get a workforce stratified into people who are thriving and people who are falling behind, sorted by an accident of who had a manager with the bandwidth to actually develop them.
