A new study from researchers at the Harvard Business School (HBS) suggests that AI could be a game-changer for managers by alleviating burdensome administrative tasks and allowing them to focus on more meaningful work.

But this opportunity shouldn’t just be reserved for managers. It can extend to employees at every level who are willing to rethink their jobs.

The key? Understanding what energizes them and what drains them, as well as where their capabilities are most valued—and then using AI to offload the things that drain them and lean more into the things that energize them where they are most productive.

How AI Could Change Work

The research, titled “Generative AI and the Nature of Work,” explores how AI is shifting the way knowledge workers allocate their tasks, particularly in software development.

The team behind the research—HBS Assistant Professor Frank Nagle; Harvard Laboratory for Innovation Science postdoctoral fellows Manuel Hoffmann and Sam Boysel; Kevin Xu, a software engineer at the software collaboration platform GitHub; and Sida Peng, a senior principal economist at Microsoft, which owns GitHub—used GitHub Copilot as a case study for their research.

The authors examined how AI integration changed the work open-source developers do. Their findings suggest that access to AI-powered tools allows developers to refocus their efforts on their core tasks—coding—while reducing time spent on managerial and administrative duties.

Interestingly, AI adoption fostered more autonomous work, which reduced the need for collaborative interactions, and encouraged exploration over repetitive exploitation, as developers ventured into new programming languages and experimental projects.

This shift has big implications for the modern workforce, the authors argue. By automating routine tasks and lowering “collaboration frictions,” AI has the potential to flatten organizational hierarchies and redefine knowledge work.

The study also suggests that AI disproportionately benefits lower-skilled workers by allowing them to close productivity gaps with their higher-skilled counterparts—a finding broadly consistent with MIT economist David Autor’s hypotheses.

Nagle and his coauthors suggest that if we use AI to allow employees to focus on more meaningful, creative work, we may be on the cusp of a workplace transformation that prioritizes innovation over administration.

AI as a Tool for Job Crafting

But beyond boosting efficiency and sparking more innovation, the other takeaway from my perspective is that AI may create openings for employees to shape their roles in ways that maximize engagement and satisfaction. This is where job crafting comes in—an approach that involves actively reshaping your work to align with what gives you energy and where your capabilities lie.

The insights from the research in our book “Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career” help show people how they can shift the correct tasks to AI—and retain the ones that most engage them and their assets.

One of the fundamental principles of making a successful job move is understanding your “energy drivers” and “energy drains.” If AI can handle the aspects of work that sap energy, employees can focus on the tasks that excite and motivate them to boost job satisfaction and performance. It in essence can help an individual practice at the top of their craft—as they define it.

Identifying Energy Drivers and Drains

Many professionals operate under the assumption that career progress is about climbing a ladder—taking on more responsibilities, gaining promotions, and increasing earnings. But Nagle’s research suggest that a lot of managers in the world of coding derive most of their energy from their work as individual contributors. Not the work of managing.

That’s not true for everyone of course. The generalized takeaway is that progress isn’t just about climbing a career ladder. It’s more personal and contextualized.

To figure out what’s currently giving you energy and depleting it, in our book we recommend to look to your past work experiences and analyze which tasks or projects left you feeling engaged and fulfilled, as well as which ones made you feel exhausted or uninspired. Once you have clarity on these energy drivers and drains and you identify themes across your roles—as well as how what energizes you has changed over time—AI can become a powerful tool for offloading those things that drain your energy.

If data entry, scheduling meetings, or drafting routine emails drain you, in other words, AI-powered tools can begin to help and allow you to lean into more creative, strategic, or relationship-driven work.

Thinking in Terms of Assets and Liabilities

Beyond focusing on what energizes you, another critical lens for figuring out what to offload to AI is the career balance sheet, a framework from HBS professor Boris Groysberg. Just as a business assesses its assets and liabilities, employees should document their assets—in the form of their skills, knowledge, and experiences. Then they should figure out their liabilities—investments of time and money to keep their assets up to date and to develop new ones.

Your assets include capabilities that are strong and can be leveraged immediately. And in Job Moves, we also use the balance sheet to help you figure out what you want capabilities you want to maintain, what you want to invest in developing and what you want to offload. An important principle is that you can’t do it all. Given that time and money aren’t infinite, there will be tradeoffs based on the required liabilities to maintain existing assets and develop new ones.

Once you’ve figured out the assets you want to maintain and develop, AI can help you free up time by allowing you to offload the things that you don’t want to do.

Making AI Work for You

AI is often framed as a force that will replace jobs. But Nagle and his coauthors’ research suggests that it in fact could be a tool that enables employees to craft more meaningful and engaging roles and careers—if they know how to harness it.