In some ways tech can do better. It can constantly monitor many more details than a human can. It doesn’t give you a disapproving look when you take too many sick days but it does calculate a score showing over the month you got less done than your coworkers.
Oh boy, I would love to work for a company where my boss monitors me constantly then sends me a daily score! /s
There is a human element to managing people that AI simply cannot do. A boss (good or bad) can change his behavior based on anything from office rumor to the way you look on a certain day. He can decide to go easy on you for a while because he heard through someone else that your dog died last week. He can simply look at you and decide that you look depressed and pull you aside and ask you what's wrong.
Human interaction and relationships are so complex and nuanced that no AI is going to replace it for a long, long time - until we have proper AGI at least.
The only thing I see AI doing is putting some proofreaders and crappy graphic designers out of business.
I think the main problem AI faces is trust. A manager needs some level of trust from both the higher ups and the workers. Not necessarily a "I trust my life with you", but more of a trust in basic human decency. I can imagine higher ups trusting some piece of software, but I have a very hard time imagining workers trusting an AI.
This is not something that can be fixed by improving the AI, as the true problem lies outside the domain of AI.
Once AI has proven itself to be trustworthy enough, it maybe can perform a mgmt role, but I have no clue how it could ever prove itself without being trusted in the first place.
It reads like you are describing reporting. How many frowny faces were sent out at Store 123 last month for attendance? But the reason you need lower/middle mgmt is that the real question is "so what do we do to stop having these frowny faces?"
What the system does is the rostering system preferences the workers with the highest scores when assigning shifts. And I suppose makes this number viewable to the workers so they can see why they have to optimise.
You do not need AI to treat the workers that have historically performed well (as measured on some quantitative scale) better than others. Most businesses just don’t do it, as finding an objective scale is hard and people have good reasons for underperforming for periods of time (sick leave, parental leave).
The supply of even untrained workers is finite, so you have to treat them as people.
Ok, let's roll with that. If I'm Alice, why do I care about Bob's score? Why do I care about your system at all? I'm trying to pay rent and not work on my kid's birthday. WHO is going to explain why the frowny faces matter? That person is your middle manager
Sure, and workers have great fun exploiting the hell out of whatever shitty metrics they're given but certain stuff just doesn't get done, and workers who like dealing with humans (probably the best sort of workers to have in a retail organization...) leave.
We could do this with developers too. Give the biggest raise to the developers with the most lines of code committed, and maybe design a shiny dashboard with it as a number to replace the project manager. What could possibly go wrong?
