Sergey Brin Uses AI to Manage People: Decide Promotions and Delegate Work at Google’s AI Division

Google cofounder Sergey Brin is embracing artificial intelligence not just to build products—but to manage people.

In a recent episode of the All In podcast released Tuesday, Brin revealed he’s been relying on AI to handle leadership tasks at Gemini, Google’s large language model unit, where he returned in 2023 to help steer the tech giant’s efforts in the escalating AI race.

Since stepping away from his executive role in 2019, Brin has largely remained behind the scenes. But his comeback has coincided with a pivotal moment for Google, which is fending off fierce competition from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity.

Now, Brin is using the very tools his company is developing to manage teams—automating everything from delegating assignments to identifying which employees should be promoted.

“Management is like the easiest thing to do with the AI,” Brin said on the podcast, describing how he uses artificial intelligence to analyze group chats and assign responsibilities across teams.

“It could suck down a whole chat space and then answer pretty complicated questions. I was like: ‘OK, summarize this for me. OK, now assign something for everyone to work on.’”

He acknowledged that the cut-and-paste style of his responses made it obvious he was using AI, but that didn’t matter—it got the job done.

“It worked remarkably well,” he added.

Perhaps more startling was Brin’s revelation that he had used the tool to recommend a promotion. By analyzing group chat activity, the AI flagged a quiet engineer who hadn’t drawn much attention in meetings but was doing standout work behind the scenes.

“It actually picked out this young woman engineer who I didn’t even notice, she wasn’t very vocal,” Brin said. “I talked to the manager, actually, and he was like, ‘Yeah, you know what? You’re right. Like she’s been working really hard, did all these things.’”

The promotion, Brin added, “ended up happening.”

While AI is widely being tested in customer service, logistics, and even coding, Brin’s experiment reflects an emerging frontier: using AI to make decisions that directly affect people’s careers. His approach is already raising questions about the implications of AI-assisted leadership—particularly in companies where management decisions shape both innovation and workplace culture.

But it’s not just Brin. Other tech leaders are also integrating AI into their daily routines. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently said he uses tools like ChatGPT and Gemini as daily tutors to break down complex subjects.

“I might say, ‘Start by explaining it to me like I’m a 12-year-old,’ and then work your way up into a doctorate-level,” Huang said.

Duolingo’s CTO also revealed this week that AI plays a key role in his three-step leadership method—evaluating whether a task should be delegated, delayed, or automated with ChatGPT.

However, not every executive is ready to turn over management duties to a machine. LinkedIn COO Dan Shapero recently told Business Insider that while AI can digest and summarize information, it still falls short on the human side of leadership.

“I’m not sure that it’s shown that it can inspire a team or that it can connect with people at a deeper level,” he said.

For Brin, the approach seems rooted in a belief that AI can outperform humans in select managerial tasks. He said on the podcast that AI is already better than him at math and coding—two areas in which he once excelled. Delegating management, he implied, was simply the next logical step.

His hands-on approach could signal how high-level corporate decisions may soon be informed, or quietly decided, by algorithms as the AI revolution accelerates. However, it is not clear for now whether this leads to more meritocratic outcomes or introduces new biases. What is clear considering Brin’s experience is that leadership, once considered one of the last human strongholds in the workplace, is no longer immune to disruption.