Could Your Next Boss Be a Robot? - Smarter With Gartner

In a world of smart machines that can drive cars, beat humans at chess, advise on medical diagnoses and perform a host of other tasks, imagine the next likely step as a smart machine as a people manager. As business investment in smart machines grows, "robobosses" will increasingly make workplace decisions that previously could only have been made by human managers. By 2018, more than three million workers globally will be supervised by robobosses, according to Frances Karamouzis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. These smart machine managers will look at data derived from worker performance in new ways because of their ability to dispassionately discover previously undetected relationships and correlations, test their hypotheses, and then elevate them to production status. "Supervisor duties are increasingly shifting toward monitoring worker accomplishments through measurements of performance that are directly tied to output and customer evaluation," explained Ms. Karamouzis.