Your teams adopted AI and got faster. Your calendar did not. Jan Vrtiska, Senior Engineering Manager at Everpure, went from 8 people in one team to 26 in three teams between 2025 and 2026, on the same hours. His teams shipped about 30% faster; his double-booked hours went up 2.5x. The bottleneck moved from writing code to coordination, and the manager is the coordination.

The talk walks through what he changed: the four routines he repeated every week (chasing status, collecting context, spotting risk, preparing 1:1s), the question he asked about each one (which part can AI do, which part needs me), and the roughly 100 plain-English rules he wrote down so a script could apply them. The script runs every four hours. AI gets called only where judgement is needed. Anything that touches people waits for his yes. We also cover the afternoon Claude rebuilt his 26 recurring 1:1s and one report's agent complained to his agent.

You walk out with the first AI management workflow to try next week: pick one repetitive task, write how you decide it as 3 to 5 rules, let AI apply them, fix the rules where it is wrong. Plus the 2027 career-fork table, so you can see which manager shape you are already drifting toward.

Delivered as a workshop at Applifting's Actually Intelligent AI, Prague, September 2026. Full page with data and sources: https://www.marian.coach/speaker/ai-engineering-manager/

45-60 min keynote or 90-min hands-on workshop. Story and numbers from Jan Vrtiska's talk at ELC meetup #43, credited on the slides.