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There’s a scene in the Steve Jobs biopic where Steve Wozniak asks Jobs what he actually does. Wozniak understood his own role clearly: he was an engineer. He wrote code. He built things. But Jobs? Jobs described himself as the conductor of an orchestra.
I’ve been thinking about that exchange a lot lately, because I think it captures exactly where we’re all heading. AI isn’t turning us into supercharged doers. It’s turning us into conductors, and that requires a completely different mindset.
The problem nobody talks about
I’ve been coaching a number of people on integrating AI into their workflows recently, and I keep running into the same pattern. The people who aren’t getting time savings from AI aren’t failing because they don’t understand what it can do. They’re not failing because they lack access to the right tools. They’re failing because they’re fundamentally disorganized.
AI is only as useful as the foundation it’s built on. If your work processes are messy, your context is scattered, and your task management is a loose collection of mental notes and sticky tabs, AI can’t do much for you. It needs structure to work from.
I hear this complaint constantly: “AI has been mis-sold to me. I’m not saving any time.” But it hasn’t been mis-sold. It’s just that AI can only deliver on its promise if there’s an organized workflow underneath it. Build that first, and the time savings follow.
That’s why I’ve written before about building AI playbooks and developing proper AI skills. These aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re the infrastructure that lets AI actually work.
The conductor problem
But here’s the deeper shift, the one that’s genuinely harder to adapt to.
When you’re doing tactical work, you’re usually focused on one or two tasks at a time. You go deep, you finish a thing, you move on. It’s cognitively manageable.
A conductor doesn’t work like that. A conductor holds the entire orchestra in mind simultaneously: what the strings are doing, where the brass comes in, what the percussion is building toward. They’re not playing any of the instruments. They’re managing the relationships between all of them.
In a world of AI agents, we’re going to be managing multiple projects running in parallel, all moving faster than any human team would. We’re task-switching constantly. We’re accountable for outputs we didn’t directly produce. And we have to resist the urge to dive in and do the work ourselves, because that’s precisely where we get bogged down.
The design leader parallel
This isn’t a new challenge, as it happens. Design leaders face exactly this transition when they move from senior practitioner to managing a team.
I’ve watched a lot of talented designers struggle with that shift. They get promoted because they’re brilliant at the work, and then they spend the next year quietly sneaking back into Figma because they can’t let go of doing. They micromanage their reports. They redesign things that were already fine. They can’t operate at the level of abstraction that leadership requires.
Working with AI agents is going to feel very similar. The temptation to wrestle with the AI until it produces exactly the output you had in your head, rather than accepting a good result and moving on, is going to be real. Learning to let go of that control is a skill in itself.
The good news is that unlike a team of designers, you can’t upset an AI agent by micromanaging it. But you can waste enormous amounts of time doing it, and that defeats the whole point.
AI burnout is already real
There’s one more aspect of this I want to flag, because I don’t think it gets talked about enough.
When you’re managing a team of agents all moving at AI speed, the cognitive load is significant. You’re context-switching constantly across multiple workstreams. Things are completing faster than you can review them. It’s relentless in a way that managing a human team simply isn’t.
This is what’s increasingly being called AI burnout. Learning to pace yourself, to batch your reviews, to build in breathing room: these are the organizational skills that will separate people who thrive in an AI-augmented world from those who burn out in it.
Where to start
If I had to distill this to one practical thing: start building the habits of a manager now, before the agents fully take over.
Get organized. Build the infrastructure that AI needs to work from. Practice delegating, even to imperfect tools, rather than doing everything yourself. Work on your ability to hold multiple projects in your head without losing the thread on any of them.
If you want help working through that transition, I offer coaching specifically for this. It’s something I’m increasingly focused on, because I think it’s one of the most valuable things I can help people with right now.
I’m also running a workshop with Smashing Magazine in July. Modern UX Practitioner covers a lot of this ground in a more structured way, if that’s more your style.
The shift from doer to conductor is coming whether we prepare for it or not. The people who handle it best will be the ones who start thinking like managers now.