Leadership & Organizations / By Swapnil Upganlawar
AI changes the work.
How should we lead?
Original analysis on the choices behind AI adoption: how teams are organized, how people develop judgment, and who remains accountable for useful outcomes.
01 / Management
What changes for managers?
Delegation, coaching, trust, and the choice of how to use time saved.
02 / Organization
Where does the work move?
Handoffs, review capacity, incentives, and the gap between faster tasks and better outcomes.
03 / Expertise
Who owns the whole system?
Architecture, decision rights, and accountability across people and AI tools.
The analysis
Decisions worth examining.
The AI score went up. What actually improved?
Four October studies show why a better AI score isn't always a reason to launch. Here's what I'd check about the measurement first.
By Swapnil Upganlawar
100 operations. 20 lost responses. What did the retries create?
A reproducible fault-injection experiment: both callers acknowledged 100 operations, but ordinary retries left 120 writes. Stable operation keys kept the ledger at 100.
By Swapnil Upganlawar
AI adoption starts with the customer problem
Reflections from the technology panel at WEMBA’s 50th anniversary: working backwards from customers, getting the data right, and making adoption a leadership responsibility.
By Swapnil Upganlawar
When faster AI work meets the organization
How to examine handoffs, architecture, review capacity, and incentives before turning task-level AI gains into claims about business performance.
By Swapnil Upganlawar
What changes when managers lead teams using AI?
A practical look at delegation, coaching, trust, and accountability as generative AI changes how a team gets work done.
By Swapnil Upganlawar
What changes when AI can do the work?
My perspective on the shift from generating answers to delegating work—and what it means for products, engineering teams, and business decisions.
By Swapnil Upganlawar
The reading desk / Checked 21 September 2026
Go to the original thinking.
A curated starting point, with the kind of evidence and access made explicit.
Harvard Business Review · July–August 2025
How AI Is Redefining Managerial Roles
Reading suggestionPublic preview reviewed. Full article not reviewed; no full-article summary is offered here.
Gartner · 4 March 2026
Managers and effective AI use
Survey reportingPublic newsroom release reviewed. Underlying client-only research not reviewed.
Gartner · 8 May 2025
Generative AI and software engineering leadership
Analyst guidance and forecastsPublic Q&A reviewed. Forecasts are distinguished from observed results.
The Quarterly Journal of Economics · Published version · 2025
Generative AI at Work
Workplace rollout studyAuthor-hosted published paper reviewed. Findings are author-reported, not reproduced here.
Organization Science · Published online · 12 June 2026
The Cybernetic Teammate
Randomized field experimentPublished open-access paper reviewed. Findings are author-reported, not reproduced here.
Gartner · 1 July 2025
Strategic trends in software engineering
Analyst guidance and forecastsPublic newsroom release reviewed. Underlying client-only research not reviewed.
NIST · January 2023
AI Risk Management Framework 1.0
Voluntary frameworkGOVERN responsibilities and oversight sections reviewed; not a study of team effectiveness.