The boss is going to look very different in the age of AI

• AI is set to transform leaders as well as the people they manage.
• Experts say that AI's impact could affect how leaders are measured.

AI isn't just going to change your job — it's going to change your manager too.

While studies have suggested AI can give average workers a big productivity boost, there are indications that it won't simply automate jobs and replace human workers, but play a more complicated role in the workforce.

Fabian Stephany, who lectures about AI at the Oxford Internet Institute, told Business Insider that it was having a more "ambiguous role in the labor market" than simply causing jobs to be "automated away" on a "mass scale."

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Stephany is among the experts who told BI that AI could affect your boss's job as much as yours, as AI makes skills — not scale — the benchmark by which workplace leaders are judged important.

AI, he added, is influencing the workplace at "the task and skill level." "It comes down to augmenting and automating certain things," he added.

The changes brought by AI dovetail with ongoing changes in how companies approach leadership, Ravin Jesuthasan, a global leader for transformation services at consulting giant Mercer, said.

"Companies are already starting to rewrite the rules of leadership, rewrite the rules of management, and reward managers for different things," Jesuthasan told BI.

Historically, a worker's seniority reflected the size of their team and budget.

With AI on the scene, it won't so much reflect salaries and budgets, but employers saying, "I'm gonna actually reward you for your impact on the company," Jesuthasan said.

If AI restructures people's workloads and makes individual workers more productive, EY's global chief technology officer Nicola Morini Bianzino told BI, metrics like the number of direct reports or budget size may no longer be adequate measures of leadership.

"You basically need to turn around the way you look at the discipline of management in general," he said.

"It's not about doing something that I was doing yesterday more efficiently. This is about doing something completely different," he added.