Middle manager proposes to company owner replacing staff with AI, gets replaced himself: 'I have took his suggestions to heart and decided to automate his role'

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  • 01
    "Middle manager wants to replace his coworkers with Al? I'll let him throw the first stone."
  • 02
    Middle manager wants to replace his coworkers with AI? I'll let him throw the first stone. S ос I own a managed service provider (MSP) firm which provides cloud computing services to clients. Business is good enough to pay my employees a respectable wage, while offering them a good work-life balance. I haven't had to lay off a single employee yet.
  • 03
    I hired a senior IT technician as a middle manager, let's call him Harry. Harry seems to have gone off the rails. about AI. He has started to micromanaging our coworkers to an unacceptable extent, and he has kept on pestering me to investigate how I could use ChatGPT and other AI technologies to reduce employee costs.
  • 04
    Frankly, this rubbed me the wrong way. Harry doesn't have a stake in any of his coworkers losing their jobs, and his constant micromanaging had become an issue. Moreso, I looked at ChatGPT and there's simply no way it could replace any of my technical employees. ChatGPT has no agency, nor can it deal with clients, nor can it see the computer screen to troubleshoot jacksh*t.
  • 05
    However, ChatGPT could easily replace a middle manager, assuming someone else takes on some additional responsibility daily. You see ChatGPT has a Code Interpreter mode (which can do calculations and process spreadsheets). This can decimate the workload of a middle manager (at least in our firm), allowing their responsibilities to be absorbed by another senior employee (me in this case).
  • 06
    I kept this in mind and have been shadowing Harry's job for the past few months. A good employee retired last week. I approached Harry and told him that I took his suggestions to heart, and have decided to automate his role with AI. I told him he could accept his redundancy package or be retrained in Azure. He chose to be retrained in Azure.
  • 07
    Unfortunately for Harry, he'll lose the comfy privileges being a middle manager entails. Fortunately for our coworkers, they will have an impartial AI making decisions. Fortunately for me, I won't have to pay for a redundant role.
  • 08
    Vore_Daddy I never thought leopards would eat MY face. Says the middle manager who voted for the leopards eating people's faces.
  • 09
    Mountain-Butterfly38 Funny how his own suggestion came back and hurt him. I'm sure the employees appreciate it. Great MC!
  • 10
    SourcePrevious3095 Middle management, the true purpose of AI. We have too many managers anyway.
  • 11
    PlayerSalt Man backstabbing man for AI. AI replacing the backstabbing traitor to mankind. Half of me can't wait for AI to figure out how to turn people into batteries the other half of me is horrified
  • 12
    TheDocJ "A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing." Emo Philips
  • 13
    EchoGecko795 A another manager told me that its going to when they replace me with AI. I said, yep, too bad for you as well, if they can replace me with AI, they can darn well replace him with it. He got mad about it.
  • 14
    Patriae8182 My company's CTO has a fair bit of experience with AI from his previous work in Silicon Valley, and he has done a fantastic job of stomping this kinda out whenever a manager so much as hints at replacing people. The CTO reminds them that middle managers are the most replaceable people on our staff.
  • 15
    steggun_cinargo He's going to try to do his new job with AI, I guarantee it
  • 16
    Coolbeanschilly It all makes sense now, middle management is no better than AI drivel. No wonder middle management holds so many meetings, they need to read the speeches their programming spat out.
  • 17
    FactorOk4741 Ok here's the thing about ai: you need a pair of human eyes to determine if the results are actually accurate and satisfactory for the task at hand.
  • 18
    coldfirewolf I don't know if anyone has posted this yet, but I noticed something that I want to give you upvote points about aside from the overall story. It's your business but you called your employees "our coworkers". I've worked in I.T. over the last decade and having a manager/director that was right there with me figuring stuff out, at a lesser extent for them I understand they have other responsibilities, and coming up with solutions was one of the keys of staying with that company as lon
  • 19
    1lluminist There is a Venn diagram of people who want to replace workers with AI. One circle is "Managers" the other circle is "People who have never used AI" It would probably be amazing to work for a company whose management has been gutted and replaced with AI. Sure the intelligence would be artificial, but it's better than the complete void that's there these days. There's also the added benefit in the form of the "Savings:Jobs Cut" ratio

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