How do I support a team losing motivation due to AI vs dev work

How do I support a team losing motivation due to AI wrangling vs dev work?

First, begin a listening survey so go and listen, listen more and listen again. Replay back to each individual what they have said to ensure you understand and have heard them correctly. This alone will fix most issues even if nothing changes. This should be a regular occurrence in one-to-one time, or a step over meeting if appropriate to your org structure and deployed for existential situstions such as the wuestion poses.

Once you have all the information. Put a group meeting in and replay all common themes and generalisations so it’s not personal issues. Then talk about your plan or strategy to fix or why the future is better.

If the position is that they are now AI coordinators and don’t want it, support them in their exits. Allow them to interview on company time, provide good references, and offer up your connections and experience in the job market - senior leaders often have lots of recruiter connections - to help them.

Consider your new flight risks. Ensure role profiles and job specs are up to date with the reality of the work. Begin to advertise an interview to replace some who will leave by being proactive in the job market - always be hiring.

Focus perhaps can switch to user needs and devex and how one now has the time to fix all those papercuts by benefiting from AI tackling the low priority but annoying issues. There is no excuse today for a slow or cumbersome build and release pipeline, or having low test quality (not necessarily coverage).

Give your people half a day a fortnight for personal projects or ideas / hackathons to improve themselves or the process of doing work at the organisation. This could be AI focused but doesn’t have to be.