Managing AI and People: A New Operating Model for Human + Agent Teams

The shift to hybrid human–AI teams, including agents, is happening faster than most managers can keep pace with. As a manager, your responsibilities don’t diminish as AI agents become a part of your team — they expand. Your business acumen, oversight, and sense of accountability are crucial to the success of a hybrid workforce.

Managing AI and People: A New Operating Model for Human+Agent Teams from the MIT Sloan School of Management provides a structured pathway that articulates how AI changes your role as a manager and how you can use it to improve team performance. You’ll learn how to unite divided employees around a shared vision for consistent and responsible AI usage, and establish one operating model to ensure your team’s AI usage is a natural, trustworthy extension of your work, rather than a liability.

Over three weeks, working module by module, you’ll build an AI People Management Playbook, tailored to your specific business context and ready to use right away — a concrete asset that illustrates your ability to lead teams that are thriving with AI, and not working against it.

By the end of this program, you'll walk away with:

Welcome to Your Online Campus

Determine the manager’s evolving role within the new AI landscape.

Analyze why the manager’s role is more consequential to an organization.

Articulate the transition to hybrid human–AI team structures.

Compare human-centric capabilities by analyzing AI constraints.

Compare the trust contract in both directions.

Analyze and address new intra-team dynamics.

Assess the need for human judgment and expertise.

Formulate strategies to resolve the “apprenticeship problem,” ensuring AI usage does not dismantle the team’s pipeline for developing tacit knowledge through practice.

Identify requirements to separate automated tasks from augmented purposes.

Implement a blended workforce of people, AI models, and agents.

Apply the five agentic principles to lead effective team dynamics.

Decide how to manage the agent life cycle.

Develop the operating-model layer of the People Manager AI Canvas and assemble the AI People Management Playbook.

This program is built for the manager who has to make AI a reality for their team, and not just talk about it. Through coursework, real-world case studies, and an AI playbook mapped to your own team dynamics, you’ll gain the tools and perspective to answer the questions you’re currently facing — how to manage your own role and prove your value in this shift to an AI-centric workplace, how to move a conflicted team toward consistent AI usage, how to onboard AI agents onto a team of human employees, and how to run a hybrid workforce where everyone’s strengths are complemented, not compromised.

This is the program that empowers managers to build trust and accountability, create positive momentum and acceptance, and unify your human–AI team to work smarter, together.

AI Playbook

Create an AI People Management Playbook that utilizes your own team structure to establish the right guardrails, oversight protocols, and processes for managing a team where AI and humans are working together.

Certificate

Earn a certificate of course completion from the MIT Sloan School of Management

Interactive

You will learn through a variety of formats including interactive videos, practice quizzes, presentations, assignments, and discussion forums

Self-Paced

This course is delivered via a self-paced online format which enables you to participate at your own pace within weekly modules. The course runs over 3 weeks with an estimated 5–7 hours per week of study time.