You're Managing People Who Use AI and You Don't. Congrats.
Let’s do a quick show of hands.
- Raise your hand if your team is using AI tools at work and you have no idea what they’re actually doing with them.
- Raise your hand if your company has exactly zero written policy on any of it.
- Raise your hand if you have privately, sincerely hoped you could just hold on another few years until retirement makes this someone else’s problem.
No judgment. I see you.
Here’s the part nobody is saying out loud: most managers right now are in this exact situation. Not because they’re behind. Not because they’re bad at their jobs. Because this moved fast, companies stalled on policy, and suddenly it’s Tuesday and you’re looking at a report your employee turned in way too quickly and you genuinely don’t know what to do or what question to even ask.
That is not a personal failure. That is a structural one that just landed in your lap.
But here’s where it becomes yours to solve.
You don’t have to use AI. You don’t have to love it. You don’t have to have a strong opinion about it one way or the other. What you do have to do is manage the people who are using it, because they are your people, and what they do reflects on you whether you understand the tool or not.
That’s not new. You’ve managed technology you didn’t fully understand before. You figured it out. This is the same thing with more hype attached to it.
The question is not “do I need to become an AI person?”
The question is “do I know what my team is doing, do I know where the lines are, and do I have a way to check the work?”
If the answer to any of those is no, you have a gap. Not a crisis. A gap. And gaps have practical fixes.
Here’s what the fix includes.
- A simple three-bucket system that tells your team what they can use AI for freely, what needs your approval first, and what is a hard no regardless of how fast it would get the job done. You hand them this. Conversation done.
- Three word-for-word scripts for the moments you don’t know how to start. When something feels off but you can’t prove it. When work showed up too fast and too polished. When you just need to set expectations before there’s ever a problem.
- A checklist of AI your team is probably already using that you don’t even recognize as AI. Grammarly. Smart Reply. Meeting transcription bots. The Adobe Summarize button. All of it.
- A spot check log so you can monitor quality without becoming the person who reads over everyone’s shoulder.
- And a documentation form, because if something goes sideways later, you want proof you had the conversation.
It’s 13 pages. It’s $12. You do not need to use AI to use this guide.
And if you’re one of the retirement runway people? Print it anyway. You’ve got a few years left and this is not going away.