What We're Reading Now
Making AI a Member of Your Team
12 August 2025
Rachel read 21 Ways People Are Using A.I. at Work compiled by Larry Buchanan and Francesca Paris in yesterday's New York Times and reflected on her "rules of thumb" for considering delegation to the non-human members of her team.
Tags: a.i., delegation, rachel read
I'm currently supporting at least five different teams who are discussing opportunities for A.I. to make work both more efficient and of higher quality. Since I'm nearly certain that these five teams represent merely a fraction of the professional world asking the same question, it's not suprising that 21 Ways People Are Using A.I. at Work made my news-worth-reading list when it appeared in my feed yesterday.
Whether you consider your Chatbot your BFF, a sworn enemy, or a friend you haven't met yet, artificial intelligence tools are becoming increasingly accessible and accepted in many workplaces. The article compiled by Larry Buchanan and Francesca Paris shares concrete examples of people delegating tasks in a variety of professional contexts. In some ways, reading feels like reading a futuristic novel from my childhood — except that it's real life and happening now. It's not without risk or consequence (the novel of the summer, Culpability by Bruce Holsinger, provides plenty of food for thought there), but it also feels foolish to ignore.
All of which got me thinking about how we might apply some of the best practices of delegating to our human team members when we think about designing and delegating tasks for A.I. For example, in a Harvard Business School Online blog post, Lauren Landry offers tips like, "Know what to delegate," "Play to your employees' strengths and goals," and "Provide the right resources and level of authority." I'd argue that all of those apply equally when using A.I. at work. The challenge arises because we often turn to A.I. to simplify things or be more efficient, and may be tempted to skip the steps of planning, preparing, and training ourselves and our colleagues to succeed.
Thinking of A.I. through the lens of delegation has prompted me to be both more open-minded about what I might ask of my A.I. tools and more thoughtful about how I construct and evaluate my prompts and the outputs. Turns out that even computers need a great boss.
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