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If you’re not used to doing it, delegating can be hard.
As a bootstrapped founder, I was accustomed to doing everything myself. In many ways, this was a good thing—being a one-man Swiss Army Knife was an effective way to learn a ton of different skills that would eventually help grow my business. On the other hand, I was exhausted.
It was a huge relief when I finally hired my first employees, but it was also harder than I thought it would be to relinquish control of the areas of my business I’d grown used to navigating alone. There was a learning curve around which tasks to hand off completely, where I should delegate but oversee, and what I should continue to do myself.
Plenty of others share this struggle. As the businessman and philanthropist Eli Broad put it, “The inability to delegate tasks is one of the biggest problems I see with managers at all levels.” Research bears this out, with data from London Business School revealing that a mere 30 percent of business leaders delegate effectively.
In contrast to overthinking founders, AI agents excel at task management—it’s kind of their whole thing. Here are three ways founders can emulate the delegation strategies used by AI.
Break It Down
One of the challenges of delegation is figuring out what, exactly, you’re delegating. Say you instruct a marketing associate to handle an upcoming product launch campaign. The ambiguity of the request is bound to cause problems: should the campaign focus on social media ads, or influencer outreach? What are the KPIs? What is the goal of the messaging?
Agents don’t paint in such broad strokes. Instead, they work backwards from the objective they’ve been given, planning tasks around the final outcome to be achieved. In order to do this, they break down the goal at hand into several smaller, actionable tasks and perform them based on specific conditions.
Leaders can emulate this structured approach to delegation by deconstructing projects into hyper-specific tasks before assigning them. Of course, AI can help you do this part, too—tools like Trello and Asana can even suggest task assignments based on team member availability, workload, and expertise.
Urgency Versus Impact
Founders making the transition into leaders will likely run into a common problem: How do you figure out what to delegate, versus what to continue to do yourself? As Jesse Sostrin writes in Harvard Business Review, the shift from “doing” to “leading” can be a tough one: “Your involvement is a mix of the opportunities, mandates, and choices you make regarding the work you do,” he says. “How ancillary or essential you are to the success of that portfolio depends on how decisively and wisely you activate those around you.”
One of the remarkable features of agentic AI is its ability to reason, which it achieves by gathering and analyzing huge amounts of data. This capability allows agents to assess the urgency and importance of tasks in real-time, adapting to changing circumstances to maintain efficiency. For instance, AI agents can plan workflows, utilize tools, and make informed decisions to accomplish complex tasks, thereby optimizing their actions based on task priority
In addition to using apps like Motion.AI to help you prioritize automatically, you can also take a page from agentic AI’s book when it comes to systematically assigning urgency to a given task. I personally love the Eisenhower Matrix, which divides tasks into one of four quadrants: Urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, neither urgent nor important. The urgent and important items are what you should do yourself. The urgent and unimportant ones are what you delegate.
Embrace “Good Enough”
AI agents are incredibly efficient at what they do—and the results are not always perfect. That’s why they’re considered complementary to their human counterparts, rather than replacements.
Take one of the tasks for which agents are especially well-suited: drafting emails. Agents are capable of pulling past message content and previous interactions to create personalized, human-sounding drafts, freeing you up from the tedium of doing it yourself. This is especially useful when it comes to messages that, while important, tend to be repetitive to write, like customer service responses.
Still, leaders with perfectionist tendencies often have a hard time accepting “good enough,” even in areas where it’s not absolutely crucial, or even important. This is a damaging habit: according to research from the Hardin Group and the Social Research Lab, 86 percent of respondents believe perfectionist expectations impact their work, and 68 percent believe perfectionism leads to burnout.
Instead of spending valuable time crafting each individual message, entrepreneurs can rely on AI agents to handle the heavy lifting, allowing them to focus on higher-level strategic tasks. While the drafts may not be winning any Pulitzers, they’re often 80 percent of the way there—requiring only minor edits before hitting send. This aligns with another one of my favorite productivity hacks, the 80/20 rule, which holds that 80 percent of desired results come from just 20 percent of the effort.
The key is recognizing when “good enough” truly is good enough. AI-generated emails might occasionally miss subtle emotional cues or industry-specific jargon, but in many cases, the time saved far outweighs the need for perfection. Plus, the technology is continually improving, learning from corrections and user preferences to get closer to the mark over time.
Delegating effectively isn’t about giving up control; it’s about optimizing your time. By taking a page from the agent playbook, leaders can free themselves from micromanagement, scale faster, and focus on what truly drives their business forward.