Ask The Analyst: AI is increasing managers' coordination burden, not reducing it — what's the fix?

Every week for The Briefing, UNLEASH’s weekly intelligence email for senior business decision-makers, we ask our community of analysts – the true HR experts – to solve the biggest workplace challenges.

This week’s question is inspired by data from InParallel. The research identified that a ‘coordination tax’ is costing organizations $64k per manager per year – and AI is only making the situation worse.

We asked the analysts: If AI is increasing managers' coordination burden, not reducing it, what's the fix?

Here are their insights.

Chris Havrilla, Chief Analyst & Advisor, AI Alchemists:

AI just exposed what was already breaking. So much talk of the future of work and workforce, but what about management?

Managers were already at the edge: decision rights unclear, spans of control too wide, systems built for command, control, throughput and output. Handing them AI agents to coordinate alongside humans, without redefining what managing means now, and with a blended workforce, just compounded it.

The fix is the future model. Effective management in a human-x-AI workforce isn’t about supervising tasks. It’s about decisions and outcomes: clarifying the what’s, when’s, and why’s; connecting people to work in ways that empower rather than constrain; coaching performance and potential, not coordinating activity. Flow, not friction.

That requires three upstream shifts:

First, redefine what managers are accountable for: decisions and outcomes, not tasks and activities.

Second, build systems that capture data and context to support humans-x-AI judgment, not just track completion.

Third, stop measuring, incentivizing, and rewarding the wrong things. Output metrics don’t capture contribution, potential, or the quality of decisions that drive results.

The coordination burden is a symptom. The real opportunity is catching the future of management up to the future of work, before the gap becomes irreversible. Architect consequences. Don’t inherit them.

Tony Guadagni, Director Analyst, Gartner HR:

AI is changing the nature of management rather than reducing the need for it. While AI can automate routine tasks and improve efficiency, it is also creating new responsibilities for managers.

Gartner found that 47% of managers say they are working harder than they were a year ago, suggesting AI has not yet delivered the expected reduction in workload.

The solution is not just presenting managers with more AI tools, but redesigning the manager role around clearer priorities and stronger support. Many managers are balancing employee needs with growing pressure to deliver business results.

Gartner found that managers spend more than 20% of their working week, around nine hours, dealing with employees’ personal and emotional concerns, reducing the time available for coaching and improving productivity.

Businesses should adopt a performance-first management approach, equipping managers with practical skills in areas such as AI integration, workload management and resource allocation. This means using AI to reduce administrative burden while allowing managers to focus on higher-value activities, including decision-making, developing talent and helping teams adapt to new ways of working.

The research indicates that this approach works. Managers who focus on performance are 20% more likely to achieve their goals, while employees working for these managers report a better experience.

David Forry, SVP, Principal Analyst, Brandon Hall Group:

AI isn't increasing managers' coordination burden. Organizational design is. Many companies have removed layers of management in pursuit of AI-driven productivity while enabling individual contributors to produce significantly more.

The result is a compressed hierarchy where fewer managers oversee more people, more work, and faster decision cycles.

Brandon Hall Group research shows AI doesn't fix structural problems. It amplifies them. Organizations with fragmented processes, unclear ownership, and disconnected workflows simply accelerate those weaknesses with AI. Organizations with standardized processes, embedded governance, and clear accountability scale AI successfully.

The fix isn't more coordination meetings or adding management layers. It's redesigning the operating model. Organizations need clear ownership, cross-functional product teams, embedded governance, and accountability that extends beyond implementation.

When coordination is built into the operating model, managers spend less time orchestrating work and more time leading it.

Allan Schweyer, Principal Researcher, The Conference Board:

That burden is real; but it's a symptom of an unfinished allocation, not of the technology.

When agents are added to a workflow that was never deconstructed, they absorb task volume but push the burden — checking, correcting, integrating, handling exceptions — onto whoever receives the output, which is usually the manager.

The fix is to finish the work redesign rather than to add coordination on top of it:

• Rebuild the human role deliberately instead of leaving people whatever the agents did not take
• Treat checking and correcting as real work with named owners, time, and skills attached
• Specify each agent's controls and evaluations at the final layer so quality assurance is designed rather than improvised on a manager's desk
• Give every agent an owner and a budget, as standing capacity rather than a project
• Measure what people and agents produce together, so a manager is accountable for an outcome rather than for supervising activity.