A research team led by Harvard Business School professor Manuel Hoffmann wanted to understand how people use gen AI, and the team’s conclusions suggest the technology is helping individual contributors take on tasks once done by managers. From 2022 to 2024, the researchers studied 50,032 global software developers, of whom half used GitHub Copilot, an open-source gen AI code-writing system. Copilot is mainly used by programmers to generate code snippets, helping them write code faster, solve problems more quickly, and learn on their own. Hoffmann and his colleagues observed more than 2.4 million actions taken on the platform, which they grouped into two categories: core work (coding) and managerial work.