If you thought managing an organization full of people was hard, just wait until you try managing an organization full of people and AI.
Allocating limited resources forced organizations to make difficult choices. AI created the illusion of abundance.
While AI can rapidly produce vast amounts of output, the cost of that abundance is surprisingly high. And it’s not just the direct costs. The indirect costs — validating the output, determining what’s usable, deciding what to do with it — fall entirely on the humans on the other side of the equation.
Sure, AI can produce something professional looking faster than any human. The savings may be a pyrrhic victory.
AI added something the old formula was never designed to handle — the ability to generate faster than you can evaluate, to produce more than you can use, to surface options faster than you can decide. The formula didn’t break because resources became unlimited. It broke because the variable on the other side of the equation changed completely.
And the response in most organizations has been to patch it — add a governance layer, form a committee, hire a prompt engineer, wait for the next tool that promises to make the last tool make sense. The formula is gone. The world has fundamentally changed. Nobody is putting that genie back in the bottle.
The question is what you run instead.
That’s what this is about.
ManagingAI is not a publication about AI. It’s a publication about management.
This is for you if you recognize the potential of AI but also know that applying traditional management thinking to it is a disaster waiting to happen.
AI requires you to be sharper and more strategic. Safely following industry best practices is a data center to nowhere.
Who’s behind it
ManagingAI is a publication of the Human Centered Information Systems Institute (HCISI.org)
The HCISI is based on the ideas of lean manufacturing, theory of constraints, and organizational systems thinking. Drawing on the works of Jim Womack, Eli Goldratt, Clayton Christensen, Don Reinertsen, Paul Strassmann and numerous others. The founders of HCISI watched Computer Aided Design (CAD) arrive with the same promises AI is making now — unlimited capability, transformation guaranteed, competitive risk if you fall behind. That pattern shapes everything here. The questions are older than the technology. The technology just made them urgent.
The Dispatch
When there’s something worth saying, it goes to subscribers first. Low frequency. No filler.