Editorial
Throughout my career, adapting to new tools and apps has been a constant. Each came with a learning curve — sometimes a guidebook for the basics, other times sticky notes and highlighters for mastering complex systems like business intelligence.
Generative AI (GenAI), as explored in the “HBR Guide to Generative AI for Managers” by Elisa Farri and Gabriele Rosani, is different.
Unlike traditional tools designed for specific tasks, generative AI reshapes how we approach business functions altogether. This guide is poised to become the definitive "cookbook" for the AI era. Every digital professional should grab it to harness AI, enhance productivity and thrive in the future of work.
To be clear, as Nick van der Meulen and Barbara H. Wixom of MIT-CISR highlighted in their research, generative AI implementations fall into two distinct categories:
- Broadly applicable tools used by individuals for diverse purposes
- Specialized solutions tailored to specific organizational needs
This book focuses on the former — tools that are versatile and accessible to everyone, making its insights relevant to all.
GenAI Is Here — The Time to Adapt Is Now
Farri and Rosani argue that generative AI is transforming the way organizations operate, yet its profound implications for management are often overlooked. While much attention is focused on how GenAI revolutionizes processes and boosts productivity, Farri and Rosani emphasize that GenAI has the potential to fundamentally reshape managerial roles. Specifically, they suggest that GenAI can serve as a "co-thinker," aiding managers in problem-solving, decision-making and strategic planning.
The role of a manager, they assert, is poised for transformation. GenAI’s ability to synthesize vast amounts of data, generate insights and simulate outcomes can enhance decision-making and creativity in ways that were previously unimaginable.
However, the authors caution that if managers fail to learn how to collaborate effectively with GenAI, they risk missing out on its full potential. Understanding how to leverage this technology is no longer optional, it is an essential skill for the modern leader.
This perspective aligns with findings from a recent survey by the Capgemini, which revealed that GenAI is on the boardroom agenda at 96% of organizations. Additionally, 54% of executives report that their leadership teams are strong advocates for GenAI. This growing support underscores the urgency for managers to understand how to integrate GenAI into their workflows and leadership strategies. At Dresner Advisory Services, we have observed that 45-47% of organizations are excited about the possibilities and will be early adopters.
Farri and Rosani say the days when data scientists, developers and IT specialists functioned as gatekeepers to AI are fading. GenAI democratizes access to advanced capabilities, enabling managers across departments to directly utilize AI tools for a diverse range of tasks. Yet many remain unaware of just how many managerial functions GenAI can support — from drafting reports and analyzing trends to brainstorming ideas and building strategic models.
Farri and Rosani’s book serves as a universal manual for achieving better results with GenAI. It provides practical guidance for managers who want to unlock the full potential of this transformative technology. Their message is clear: the time to adapt is now. Understanding how to work effectively with GenAI is no longer just an advantage — it is the key to staying competitive in an increasingly AI-driven business landscape.
Related Article: Wharton Analyzes GenAI Adoption in Report
GenAI as a Partner, Not a Tool
Historically, machines have been seen as tools, tracing their lineage back 2.6 million years to the earliest human instruments used for cutting, pounding and accessing food. These tools extended human capabilities, but they required direct control and offered no real agency.
Today, with the advent of generative AI, the role of machines has evolved dramatically. Managers can now interact with machines in natural language, asking them to collaborate on tasks and engage in meaningful conversations. This shift represents a fundamental change — moving machines from tools to collaborative partners.
Throughout history, technological advancements have transformed the way managers work, but GenAI takes this a step further. Machines are no longer just instruments of efficiency; they are assistants and collaborators. Large language models (LLMs) enable machines to understand, generate, summarize and translate in ways that feel authentic and conversational. Farri and Rosani argue that this marks the transition from machine as a passive tool to machine as an active participant in the managerial process.
As collaborators, GenAI redefines how managers lead and think. In its role as a co-pilot, GenAI becomes an efficient collaborator, handling administrative, communication and operational tasks with precision. As a co-thinker, it becomes a thought partner, engaging in dialogue, offering new perspectives and challenging assumptions. By doing so, GenAI doesn’t just enhance productivity — it reshapes how decisions are made and strategies are formed.
To unlock the full potential of this transformation, leaders must cultivate a "GenAI mindset." This involves understanding how to leverage GenAI as both a co-pilot and a co-thinker, integrating its capabilities into everyday workflows. Farri and Rosani’s book provides a roadmap for this shift, detailing 35 specific managerial tasks that GenAI can enhance. These tasks will matter deeply to managers and individual contributors, especially in large organizations where complexity and scale demands novel approaches to problem-solving.
The message is clear: GenAI is no longer just a tool — it is a partner. Embracing this transformation is critical for leaders who want to stay ahead in an increasingly AI-driven world.
Using GenAI for Personal and Professional Growth
Generative AI is here to help you get organized and work more efficiently. It is about improving your personal productivity, managing your time, organizing your calendar, sorting and drafting emails, summarizing long documents and producing content.
With tools like Google Gemini and Outlook Copilot, GenAI can streamline your workflow, reducing the time spent navigating lengthy email threads or juggling competing priorities. It can summarize complex conversations, highlight key points and even generate concise summaries atop emails, saving you the effort of digging through endless replies and quoted text.
Beyond efficiency, GenAI supports deeper personal and professional growth. As a co-thinker, it can guide you through reflection on your leadership style, help you solicit and act on feedback and refine your communication skills. Whether you are crafting a compelling speech, building a slide deck or preparing for a job interview, GenAI can assist at every step.
For example, it can generate interview questions tailored to your resume and cover letter, abstract reports into clear takeaways with references or suggest insightful questions to drive discussions. By helping you prioritize tasks, summarize meetings and focus on what matters most, GenAI empowers people to grow as leaders and achieve more with less effort.
Conference
Sep
16
HR Tech Conference Las Vegas 2025
Register
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
As a co-thinker, Generative AI serves as an expert coach, guiding managers through deep self-reflection on leadership styles, beliefs, actions and their outcomes. By drawing on seminal research and offering structured prompts, GenAI helps leaders refine their understanding of what drives effective leadership. It also enhances the ability to solicit, process and act on feedback, fostering personal and professional growth. With AI as your partner, you can continuously evolve as a more self-aware, adaptive leader.
GenAI also revolutionizes preparation for key professional moments, from speeches to job interviews. For speech preparation, it helps frame the story, structure the narrative and fine-tune the message — all tailored to your audience and delivered in your native language. It even suggests non-verbal communication tips to enhance delivery. For job interviews, GenAI extracts key insights from resumes and cover letters, formulates thoughtful interview questions and provides a virtual rehearsal space to refine your responses. As a Toastmaster ATM Gold, I see this as a game-changing tool for developing confidence, clarity and impact in communication.
Related Article: Generative AI Use Cases and Adoption Tips for IT Leaders
Where AI Fits Into Content Creation
Generative AI takes your communication to the next level, helping leaders craft text and create slides that not only convey your message but elicit the response you desire. It proofreads for grammar and usage errors while offering real-time suggestions to improve structure, tone, concision and audience engagement.
With its ability to organize and logically structure your ideas, GenAI ensures a clear narrative flow, suggests relevant subtopics and helps you draft content in a polished, professional tone. From impactful writing to visually engaging slide decks, GenAI streamlines the process and sharpens your communication.
Managing Teams and Collaboration With GenAI
Generative AI acts as a co-pilot for managers, streamlining time-consuming aspects of meeting management, goal setting, task planning and reporting. It can draft meeting agendas, transcribe discussions and generate clear, actionable summaries that recap key points and highlight next steps. After the meeting, GenAI creates action items, assigns due dates and organizes follow-ups, reducing the administrative burden on the team and freeing up valuable time for higher-value and creative work. By automating these processes, it allows teams to collaborate more effectively using integrated apps.
Beyond meetings, GenAI supports managers in complex problem-solving and strategic planning. It helps identify root causes, organize potential solutions and evaluate their pros and cons, enabling smarter decision-making.
For goal setting, it ensures alignment with organizational priorities and suggests the most effective techniques to achieve clarity and focus. GenAI also aids task planning and team composition by identifying the right mix of skills, backgrounds and personalities for optimal performance. From generating ideas to crafting team purpose statements, resolving conflicts, and framing complex problems, GenAI empowers managers to lead with precision, purpose and impact.
GenAI for Data Analysis Support
As a data person, I found it particularly fascinating to learn how GenAI is transforming information search, data analysis and visualization. Scrolling through endless web pages, search results or formulas in spreadsheets is undeniably tedious. Farri and Rosani invite us to imagine a world where we simply talk to a search engine, business intelligence (BI) tool or spreadsheet, describing the information we need or specifying the data to process. GenAI makes this a reality by turning time-consuming tasks into intuitive human-AI interactions.
With GenAI, managers can quickly find answers, extract insights and understand data without the traditional manual effort. Whether it’s asking GenAI to elaborate on a specific query or to summarize findings in natural language, the experience is personalized and efficient. Internally, it can search company knowledge bases, databases, documents and reports, delivering precise, actionable insights. For competitive analysis, GenAI can scan the web, extract key findings and cite sources directly, enabling managers to stay on top of the latest developments in their fields of concern.
Beyond search, GenAI can revolutionize data industrialization. It can read datasets, describe their contents, perform quality checks and prepare them for analysis. Imagine asking GenAI to clean data by removing duplicates, normalizing values or correcting variable inconsistencies — it handles these tasks with ease. It does not stop there; GenAI can extract insights, perform calculations, evaluate performance and even translate data into compelling visualizations. From generating charts to writing captions and simple explanations, it helps communicate complex data in a way that is easy to understand.
The integration of GenAI into data workflows redefines what is possible. Managers no longer have to wrestle with raw data or spend hours building reports from scratch. Instead, they can focus on interpreting insights and driving strategic decisions, with AI as a trusted partner. Catalogs of organizational knowledge and data play a pivotal role here, serving as repositories that GenAI can scan and analyze, ensuring that valuable insights are always at their fingertips. In short, GenAI empowers managers to work smarter, not harder, in the age of data-driven decision-making.
35 Ways to Enhance Work With GenAI
Farri and Rosani identified 35 practical ways managers and individual contributors can leverage generative AI to enhance their work.
For managers, the goal should be to empower employees by fostering a culture of experimentation, encouraging the development of new skills, redesigning workflows for greater efficiency and establishing a sense of collective responsibility.
By integrating GenAI into daily tasks and strategic initiatives, managers can unlock new opportunities for innovation and collaboration, enabling their teams to thrive in an AI-driven workplace.
Elisa Farri and Gabriele Rosani's “HBR Guide to Generative AI for Managers” serves as a definitive playbook, showcasing how leaders can leverage GenAI for transformational results.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
