How to Delegate to AI: Brief It Like a New Hire, Not a Search Box

Our idea of onboarding at one company I worked for was an Excel file. Five days of back-to-back conference calls with every department, and then a pile of demos and instructions to teach yourself about our products.

That was the training.

Inconsistent. Burdensome. Insufficient in design and outcome.

That’s what we do to AI, too.

The difference is in the handoff

 Two people open AI on the same morning. The first types, “Write me a plan to improve team morale.” Back come five paragraphs of beige advice with suggestions like: Host a team lunch and  Recognize good work. Technically correct, and so surface level that it gets called slop. So, the results underwhelm. That person closes the tab and tells everyone AI is overhyped.

The second writes a brief. Eleven people, six of them remote. Two left last quarter, the ones who stayed are carrying the load, and a hiring freeze means headcount is not the fix. Here is what I already tried and what fell flat. Give me three specific moves I can make in the next thirty days on a small budget. Flag anything that could backfire on a burned out team. Bring citations and invent nothing. 

Same tool. Not much more typing. A completely different result.

Same thing with humans. When we give them perspective, help them build knowledge and practice, provide consistent repetition, guide them away from their errors, we get better results with them, too.

A lazy handoff has a price

Harvard and Boston Consulting Group ran a study with 758 consultants doing real work with AI. On tasks inside what AI is good at, their output was rated about 40 percent higher in quality and they finished faster. On tasks outside that range, the same consultants were about 19 percentage points more likely to be wrong, because AI was confidently, fluently wrong and convincing enough that they followed it off the cliff.

Ethan Mollick, the Wharton professor, suggests treating AI like a person joining the team with a defined role, briefed the way you would brief a capable new hire on day one. I take that with a grain of reality. Most of us do a terrible job onboarding humans. Remember the Excel file example above?

The people getting the most out of AI are not the most technical people in your company. They are the ones who set context and say what good looks like.

The difference between that old training attempt or the beige team morale reply is the handoff, the direction, the delegation process.

Collaborating with AI is still delegation. Give it a role, set the context, brief it like a capable new hire, then evaluate and adjust the work. No new hire is up to speed in a few days, so keep collaborating. That is how it becomes a teammate worth having.

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Watch this week’s Mini but Mighty℠ Leadership Lesson on YouTube to learn more:

Stop Blaming AI. Brief It Like a New Hire. 

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Managers who hand off badly to people hand off badly to machines. Boss at the Helm builds Human Intelligence and Humanity Skills across manager populations through live workshops, online courses, and the Helm Leadership Essentials℠ cohort program. Start a conversation at bossatthehelm.com/contact.

Start with yourself. Lead yourself. Get the handoffs right with people and with machines. Then lead others. Be a Boss.