Humans or AI?

It’s a tough choice but we know it’ll be a while until AI becomes smart enough to replace the OGs.

This boss had to make a tough choice between the two.

Let’s check out what happened.

Middle manager wants to replace his coworkers with AI? I’ll let him throw the first stone.

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.

He wanted someone for the job but it didn’t go as planned..

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 wants an AI revolution.

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.

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.

This boss isn’t pleased with the likes of AI.

More so, 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.

However, ChatGPT could easily replace a middle manager, assuming someone else takes on some additional responsibility daily.

He did his research..

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).

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.

Harry’s plan backfired!

I told him he could accept his redundancy package or be retrained in Azure.

He chose to be retrained in Azure.

Unfortunately for Harry, he’ll lose the comfy privileges being a middle manager entails.

It worked for the boss.

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.

Yikes! That must have been sad for Harry!

He will probably never mention AI again!

Let’s check out what folks on Reddit think about this story.

This person has a joke to crack!

This person thinks AI cane easily replace middle managers.

This person knows that AI needs humans!

This person isn’t fond of a middle managers job.

This person speaks from personal experience.

AI or not, humans can’t be replaced all that easily!

If you enjoyed that story, check out what happened when a guy gave ChatGPT $100 to make as money as possible, and it turned out exactly how you would expect.