Of late, there’s been a frenzy to incorporate ChatGPT and other AI tools into all manner of operations and workflows. This is no surprise. But what’s the role of a manager during this strange period, when we know generative AI will change work but don’t yet really know how?

For some clues, I sat down with Rob Bray, an associate professor of operations at Kellogg.

Just last year, Bray published a textbook for MBA students on how to use the popular programming language R. Then came ChatGPT, which could handle his students’ most challenging coding problems, thus rendering his labored-over textbook—and the entire course he had designed around it—obsolete. So Bray regrouped and redesigned his course to incorporate ChatGPT. The experience offered a kind of natural experiment into how the tool changes skill acquisition for people with varying levels of interest in a topic.

Based on this experience, here’s his advice for managers as they lead teams and develop talent in this newest age of AI.

You’re leading an expedition: it’s time to get your team excited

ChatGPT empowers workers to be creative in novel and unexpected ways—so you should, in turn, empower your team to find these ways. Only by playing around with the tool will teams start to learn which tasks it’s equipped to help with, which it isn’t, and which tasks were never even remotely possible a year ago but are now as easy as entering a few prompts.

“ChatGPT enables a whole set of new things that you can do, but they’re very specific things, and they’re often kind of weird things that we never would’ve thought of before,” says Bray. “You need to actively go there and think about how to act.”

In most lines of work, “people have been doing things for a long time: all the tips and tricks are mostly figured out. But now, all of a sudden, a whole slew of tips and tricks that would’ve been absolutely impossible this time last year have been unlocked,” he says.

Take sentiment analysis: using computational tools to analyze text for evidence of how negatively or positively people think about a topic (often, a brand). This has historically been difficult for a machine to accomplish; previous measures, like tallying word frequencies, were very crude. But “ChatGPT just made sentiment analysis totally trivial,” says Bray.

In his course, Bray found that asking students to present on the tips and tricks they learned while solving problems was highly motivating. “Humans are intrinsically curious,” says Bray. “Once you get one person showing off something cool that blows the brain and makes everyone’s life easier, what I found was the students just became really excited.”

Managers, he suggests, should consider something similar, incentivizing individuals to hunt out new use cases for the technology and share them with their colleagues.

Be thoughtful about which projects to assign to whom

For tasks like coding, number-crunching, or investment analysis, ChatGPT allows entry-level employees to very quickly get up to speed. Where employees are invested in the success of their projects, this is a huge boon. “They’re going to learn more, they’re going to ramp up faster, they’re just going to be more productive,” says Bray.

But there’s a catch. “If your workers are not fundamentally interested in the problem that you’re working towards, they can now do a lot of the work with their brain off, and that means that they are not really even getting better.”

This means that the “fit” between an employee and their work has never mattered more.

Bray found that students who enrolled in his course as an elective, suggesting an inherent interest in learning R, were able to learn the material “faster and better,” while those who were required to take the course generally got less from the experience. “They didn’t want to be there,” he says. “So they said, ‘Okay, so we’re just gonna offload all this work to the ChatGPT.’”

Bray sees it as inevitable that employees who use ChatGPT regularly will become reliant on it, at least initially. For those who are curious and engaged, this temporary downside is overshadowed by the upside of being able to get nearly instantaneous feedback from “the best tutor of all time,” says Bray.

But because it will now be possible to do passable work without engaging with the material as deeply, the long-term skill development and potential of less-motivated employees is likely to take a hit. For this reason, Bray argues, it is critical to assign employees tasks over which they can truly feel ownership.

You can read the rest of Bray’s advice for managers here. You can also read more about the teaching experience upon which his advice is based here.