I let AI replace my boss. It was sort of helpful but fell flat in the face of workplace politics.

Ryan Kailath; Getty Images; BI

My boss had a proposal: It was time to replace him with AI.It was late spring, following months of AI-attributed layoffs across the economy that left workers wondering: Am I next? In the name of journalism, my editor and direct manager, Ryan Kailath, agreed to be a guinea pig.I'm an AI skeptic, but some aspects of "RyanBot" excited me. It wouldn't be busy with meetings, lunch breaks, or other reporters. It could read every line of a 100-page data report and provide feedback within seconds. I could see how having a second brain trained on my editor's preferences and proclivities might be helpful.While that proved true sometimes, working with my boss's AI clone taught me the value of skills I didn't realize were crucial in a manager until they were gone. I had accidentally stumbled upon one of the biggest questions in our AI-workplace age."It's going back to our roots of understanding who a manager is," said Emily Campion, an associate professor of management and entrepreneurship at the University of Iowa. "What is the goal of a manager in an organization? Or to make it even maybe a little more philosophical: What is a leader?"And if you're wondering, Ryan recused himself from editing this story, though he did fact-check the final draft.How we set up my ChatGPT bossAt the end of May, Ryan and I sat down with ChatGPT's Codex. He tweaked its settings to have a pragmatic voice and gave it two essay-length instruction manuals. One detailed who he is, including his communication style and professional motivations. The other was about how he worked, with instructions on how the chatbot made in his image should think, assess, and provide feedback. For example, he wrote that his bot-twin should "encourage reporters to argue for their ideas if they believe in them."I tried to send Ryan and RyanBot the same story pitches, messages, questions, and drafts, then compared their responses for the next four months. Every time I talked with friends about work, I had a shadow boss in the back of my mind: a chatbot that I knew was ready to edit me at any hour of the day. This was going to get weird.Where AI couldn't replace my bossWhat surprised me most was how quickly RyanBot turned into a more philosophical experiment about the value of a manager.