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Hello my friends!!

Another week in 2026… how are we feeling??

I’m still riding my birthday high!!

I know, I know you’re sick of hearing me talk about the miraculous day in which I graced the Earth with my presence. But I get ONE MONTH, and I’m taking full advantage of it!!!!

Here are some things you’re def not sick of:

🎉 TRANSFORM!!! I’m gonna be there for the FIFTH year in a row. All my besties in one spot?? THE DREAM. If you’re gonna be there - request a spot at a happy hour I’m cohosting we’ll link up IRL!

🎧 The newest ep of the I Hate it Here pod dropped featuring Madison Butler! We talk about all things authenticity at work and my beef with the “bring your whole self to work” movement.

📺 HR Therapy is THIS WEEK! Balancing costs with the needs of your people feels like a never ending struggle. We’re getting into what you need to know about what costs are rising and how to balance that and give your employees what they actually need.

🤓 Something I need your help with: I'm putting together some research on the biggest challenges HR is facing and I NEED your help!! Can you please take less than 5 mins to answer a few questions to help inform my research?? I will be forever thankful and it would be the best gift a gal could get on her birthday month...

Now onto today… a few weeks ago I asked if manager use cases for AI would be interesting. A lotttt of people replied and said write it!! So here I am…

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NEW

Four Ways Managers Can Use AI That Has Nothing to Do With Writing Emails:

Here's something we all know: managers are one of the most under-supported groups in any organization.

I said it but you were probably thinking it okaayyy.

Managers are expected to develop and grow their team, hit business goals, run tight meetings, make tough calls on performance and promotions, and somehow stay sane through all of it.

It’s not just the manager tasks that worry me…

Managers serve as the connective tissue between leadership vision and frontline reality. They have the biggest impact on an employee’s engagement.

🕷️With great power, comes great responsibility!🕷️

So forgive me for sounding the alarm on managers yet again but things are getting more and more complicated.

Why?

Because we’ve seen this trend that in the age of AI, the manager layer is getting slashed. Which means team sizes are getting bigger and the managers that remain are being left with A LOT on their plates.

What a clusterf*ck she whispers to herself.

In HR we get a front row seat to the manager's struggles. We’re coaching managers through difficult convos, helping them understand people data, and preparing them for decisions that literally shape someone’s growth and career.

Sometimes, I do view HR as the force multiplier for managers.

But we’re also up to our ears in work and have a task list that we need to ruthlessly prioritize. Meaning, we might not get to that manager 1:1 because we have more high priority work to get to.

We need another type of force multiplier…

✨ Enter AI. ✨

AI, used well, can dramatically change what's possible for managers.

How so???

Well let me tell you, here are four ways managers can start using AI in ways that actually matter and impact their workload in a positive way.

(Feel free to steal what’s below and share it with your managers).

#1: For 1:1s

I want you to think about your regular check in with your manager.

How does it usually go?

For some it could go like this: their manager rolls into the meeting 2-3 mins late, has nothing on the agenda and just launches into some questions about the status of things, gives a random piece of feedback then there is little back and forth and the meeting ends because the manager has to jet off to another meeting.

Sound realistic?

Most manager 1:1s follow the same pattern: status updates, any blockers, next steps, then wrap up.

Useful? Kind of yes.

But they rarely become the kind of conversations that actually develop someone and help them grow.

Let’s be honest, most managers try to wrap status meetings into development convos and fail because THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING.

Status update 1:1 ≠ a developmental 1:1

SAY IT WITH ME!!!

We need to make that distinction ASAP.

Most developmental convos fail because little prep is actually done. Most managers walk into a 1:1 with good intentions and not much else. They haven’t spent real time on where the employee is in their development, what patterns have been showing up or what questions they should ask to unlock some self-awareness and growth.

Truthfully, I don’t think most managers have time to think that deeply about each person on their team. This is where AI can help.

🛠️ Here's how it works in practice: A manager pastes their notes from the past few 1:1s into an AI tool of their choosing and asks it to identify:

Patterns
Recurring themes
Gaps

➡️ Then they ask it to suggest 3–5 coaching questions tailored to where the person seems to be stuck or growing.

AI can surface structure and prompts that the manager wouldn't have potentially thought of under the pressure of a work afternoon. It's the difference between the manager showing up with nothing and showing up with a rough draft.

📣 What HR can coach: Help managers build a simple habit that before every 1:1, spend 5 minutes with an AI tool reviewing their notes. That's it!!! You can even provide them with a prompt template to get started.

Something like: "Here are my notes from recent 1:1s with [name]. What patterns do you notice? What questions should I be asking that I'm not?" Start them there.

And please please please remind them to use critical thinking when the AI responds because while the AI has notes on the person it doesn’t actually KNOW the person the way the manager can.

#2: For team data

Most managers have some version of team performance data, like:

Engagement survey results
Pulse survey results
Team polls
Productivity metrics
Sprint velocity (Eng teams)
Whatever the business tracks (so many metrics!!)

But most of them don't really know what to do with the data.

And to be clear it’s not because they’re incapable!! Data is not everyone’s love language or core skill set. A lot of managers don’t get trained on data analysis.

Instead they’ll usually glance at the engagement score, note that it went up or down, and move on. The context underneath a score like, what's actually happening, what might be causing it, where the risk is building often gets missed.

AI can act as a first-pass analyst.

🛠️ Here's how it works in practice: A manager exports their team's engagement survey results (aggregate, not individual because VERY important for privacy) and pastes them into an AI tool with a prompt like: "Here are my team's results across these dimensions. What patterns stand out? What might be early warning signs? What questions should I investigate further?"

AI can help managers then ask better questions and oftentimes it'll flag something the manager would have missed because they were too close to it.

This gets more powerful when you pair it with other signals.

Like: A manager who brings in their 1:1 notes and engagement results and recent output data starts to get a genuinely holistic picture of what's happening on their team, not just snapshots.

📣 What HR can coach: Help managers think like investigators, not reporters. Ahh the lost art of curiosity!!! TBH: The goal isn't to summarize the data, it's to develop a theory about what's going on. AI is good at helping form and stress-test those theories.

⚠️ One caution to pass along: make sure managers understand what they can and can't feed into AI tools based on your company's data policies. Aggregate data is usually fine. Individual-level data needs careful handling, and you'll want to set those guardrails clearly before they experiment. Also, look into the tools being used and their privacy settings. Some Enterprise plans do not train the AI on sensitive data.

The bottom line: before suggesting any of these use cases, make sure you have all your questions answered AND documented AND shared.

#3: Help make decisions with structure

This use case is where AI can potentially make the biggest difference but managers need the most coaching to do it well. Double double toil and trouble.

Hiring decisions, performance improvement plans, promotion calls, role restructuring.

Anyone else tense up reading those 4 things???

These are KEY moments where bias sneaks in, where gut feeling masquerades as judgment, and where managers who don't have a structured framework default to things like personality or as the kids would call it “vibes.”

⚠️ And HR knows better than anyone else, the outcome to these decisions can be incredibly consequential and uneven.

BUT TO BE CLEAR: AI doesn't eliminate bias. In fact, it can introduce more if you’re not careful.

To avoid that, adding structure to the decision-making process can make a real difference when it comes to things like bias.

For hiring: My least favorite thing is when a manager comes to you with an ask for a hire but has spent exactly 0 seconds thinking about said hire outside of the fact that they need them to start ASAP. AI can be an incredible tool to help them get started before they even end up talking to HR. Managers can leverage AI in hiring by using it to find skills gaps on their team, drafting potential job descriptions, drafting nice to haves vs need to haves and even going as far as creating projects and rubrics to assess the hiring process. Imagine if a manager came to you with all this drafted and then you could start the convo from a much better place…

For PIPs and performance conversations: A manager can use AI to help them think through whether they have enough evidence that a performance issue is real and documented, not just a feeling. How often has a manager come to you and just said, there’s a performance issue with little examples or even how they’ve intervened… Too often IMO

With AI managers can describe the situation and ask: "What am I potentially missing? What would a skeptical observer push back on? Is there anything here that looks like a management or context issue rather than a performance issue?" This kind of prompt is surprisingly good at surfacing blind spots. Direct them to start there before coming to you with “just a feeling.”

For promotions: AI can help a manager build a structured case like what has this employee demonstrated, against which criteria, with what evidence instead of the usual "I think they're ready, I just know it" conversation that HR has to navigate through.

📣 What HR can coach: The goal here ISN’T to remove managerial judgment. In fact, I think judgement is a real skill we need to train managers on!! AI can help make manager’s judgment legible and stress-tested. So when managers walk into a high-stakes decision with a structured AI-assisted framework, they actually make better decisions and they can defend them more clearly.

Spoiler alert: That protects the organization and the employee.

➡️ Teach managers to treat AI like a skeptical colleague who will ask the hard questions they're avoiding.

#4: Meetings

This use case sounds somewhat tactical, but the downstream effects are downright strategic.

The average manager loses a MASSIVE amount of time to:

Meetings that could have been an async update
Follow-ups that never happen because nobody captured decisions clearly (my biggest pet peeve)
Prep that doesn't happen because there wasn't time

AI can help with this problem on multiple fronts and BTW it doesn't require buying new tools.

Most of the productivity-focused AI platforms already include meeting summaries, action item extraction, and async video/voice tools!! Heck, non productivity-focused tools are also there. Google has a notetaker, Notion has a notetaker, everything at this point has a note taker!!! I guarantee if you check your meeting tech stack you’ll find something free already available for notetaking.

📣 What HR can propose: Help managers identify ONE recurring meeting per week that could be replaced with an AI-assisted async update.

An example: Instead of a 45-minute team sync, the manager sends a short video or voice note recapping the top priorities, drops it into Slack, and then uses AI to pull structured action items and questions for people to respond to. In theory, the meeting still happens but instead it’s 20 minutes of async engagement instead of 45 minutes of synchronous time.

To note: This isn't right for every meeting!! There are conversations that have to be live. But the reflex to default to synchronous discussion for everything costs teams hours every week that they never get back. If your leaders default is, let’s have a meeting to discuss this might be one of the *the most* impactful uses of AI you can introduce.

TBH: I’m a big fan of AI tools that transcribe and summarize meetings because it means I can actually be present in the conversation and not take a million notes while trying to listen. The AI-generated summary afterward helps me catch anything that needs follow-up. This way I’m always sure that decisions get documented and my action items don't fall through the cracks.

➡️ Managers should always be auditing their calendars and leveraging tools to help them have more TIME.

A note on coaching:

While AI can give managers better inputs, the manager still has to do the thinking.

AI used well doesn't make managers lazier, it makes their effort more targeted.

They end up spending less time on things that can be systematized and more time on the things that genuinely require a human like:

Reading the room
Having difficult convos
Making judgment calls in ambiguous situations
Being present for their people

📣 And our role as HR isn't to be the AI expert. Although it feels like it some days…

I think our role is more to help everyone around us develop the habit of structured thinking.

We want our employees to have a logical approach to breaking down problems into smaller more actionable parts, aka structured thinking!

And AI helps make that possible.

I believe the managers who'll thrive in the next few years won’t be the ones who outsource their judgment to AI, they’re the ones who are using AI to make their judgement sharper.

That's what we should be coaching for.

What’s next:

You know how I always say data is my love language?

It’s because data can tell an incredible story of what is happening in your org!! But I’ve noticed that lately all the things we used to measure feel somewhat… outdated.

So next week, in the spirit of new, I want to look at new data we should be evaluating and what that means for how we talk about things like engagement and beyond.

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📚 What I’m reading: Four Eids and a Funeral by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé and Adiba Jaigirdar. I was delighted to see this adorable premise for a book and excited to send it to all my Muslim friends. BTW: If you’re wondering what to say at the start of Ramadan to your Muslim friends you can say Ramadan Mubarak and when it's time for Eid you can say Eid Mubarak. Easy peasy!
📺 What I’m watching: Industry OBVI! If you were to take any of my recs seriously, this is the one. If you love excellent tv this is hands down the best show on right now. I’m a S1 OG, I did a pod episode on the themes of work from this show. Just watch it!!! Also it's on HBO so it's basically NSFW. Take caution, there are mature themes.
📱 What I’m popping off in the group text about: ONE TREE HILL. My friend and I just discovered that we didn’t know that we both loved OTH. I know, how does one become friends without knowing that… it’s just that we had a lot of other common groundwork before this even came up. But more importantly, we discovered that we both might want to attend the annual event that they throw. So here’s to making that happen this year!!