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New Research Suggests the Answer is Yes—If They Know How to Craft Their Roles
A new study from researchers at the Harvard Business School suggests that AI could be a game-changer for managers by alleviating burdensome administrative tasks and allowing them to focus on more meaningful work.
But this opportunity shouldn’t just be reserved for managers. It can extend to employees at every level who are willing to rethink their jobs.
The key? Understanding what energizes them and what drains them, as well as where their capabilities are most valued—and then using AI to offload the things that drain them and lean more into the things that energize them where they are most productive.
How AI Could Change Work
The research, titled “Generative AI and the Nature of Work,” explores how AI is shifting the way knowledge workers allocate their tasks, particularly in software development.
The team behind the research—HBS Assistant Professor Frank Nagle; Harvard Laboratory for Innovation Science postdoctoral fellows Manuel Hoffmann and Sam Boysel; Kevin Xu, a software engineer at the software collaboration platform GitHub; and Sida Peng, a senior principal economist at Microsoft, which owns GitHub—used GitHub Copilot as a case study for their research.
The authors examined how AI integration changed the work open-source developers do. Their findings suggest that access to AI-powered tools allows developers to refocus their efforts on their core tasks—coding—while reducing time spent on managerial and administrative duties.
Interestingly, AI adoption fostered more autonomous work, which reduced the need for collaborative interactions, and encouraged exploration over repetitive exploitation, as developers ventured into new programming languages and experimental projects.
This shift has big implications for the modern workforce, the authors argue. By automating routine tasks and lowering “collaboration frictions,” AI has the potential to flatten organizational hierarchies and redefine knowledge work.