Will AI replace managers?
You probably expect AI to reduce jobs in technical & software roles, administrative and entry-level roles. What about management roles? Gartner predicts that 20% of companies will use AI to flatten hierarchy and up to 50% of middle management jobs could disappear due to AI. You read that right: half of middle managers!
AI automates coordination. AI routes information faster than humans. AI synthesizes status reports, flags blockers, and tracks progress without a weekly standup. Jack Dorsey (of Block fame) argued for flattening the hierarcy explicitly in his March 2026 essay "From Hierarchy to Intelligence," co-authored with Sequoia's Roelof Botha, where he declared that corporate hierarchy was never a design choice — it was "an information-routing protocol invented to solve coordination at scale under human cognitive limits." His conclusion: AI solves that problem now, so the hierarchy is obsolete. Block eliminated nearly 40-50% of its total headcount and the stock surged 20%. The market, apparently, agreed with him.
The functions being automated are not the functions that good managers were ever supposed to be doing. Agile practitioners have been arguing for over two decades that status reporting, information brokering, and task oversight are exactly what managers should move away from. The player-coach model that AI-forward companies are now racing to implement — where surviving managers contribute real work alongside their teams, set context instead of dictating process, and coach rather than control — is not a new idea born from AI. It is the idea that agile leadership coaches have been advocating for years, inside organizations that kept rewarding the old behaviors anyway. What has changed is that the organizations can no longer afford the old behaviors.
The organizations eliminating middle managers are not eliminating the need for the work that good middle managers do. They are eliminating the version of the role that was defined by coordination overhead — the meeting scheduling, the status aggregating, the approval routing. What they need now, desperately, is the version of the role that was always supposed to exist: leaders who can set clear purpose, coach people through ambiguity, make fast decisions with incomplete information, and build teams that do not need to be managed in the traditional sense. DHR Global named exactly this — agile leadership at "decision velocity" — the most critical leadership competency for 2026. That capability does not emerge from a title change or a reorganization announcement. It is built through deliberate practice, honest feedback, and effective training. The managers who thrive in what comes next will not be the ones who survived the cuts. They will be the ones who chose to develop the skills that the new model actually requires, before it was demanded of them.
Certified Agile Leader® workshops
Give your leadership skills a boost at our Leadership workshops. You’ll learn the Leadership Agility® model, how to effectively manage organizational-scale changes, how to optimize your organization’s culture, and how to coach people: all the human-centric leadership skills that AI can’t touch. You’ll also earn the Scrum Alliance® CAL 1™ plus two certifications from Agile Leadership Journey®. Bam! Contact us for private workshops with your leadership team.