this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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Now replace middle management with AI and see how this will work.
this is actually what it should be used for. If companies pivoted their AI use to exactly that I almost guarantee you peoples opinions, i.e. middle manager wannabe techbros on linkedin, would change on it. But this is what AI should be used for. mundane project management style tasks. let your devs do dev work, let your upper management continue to do nothing and reap the rewards, and get rid of the yes men/women in the middle. THAT's when you'll see the shift.
Haha. Right now I'm untangling the mess of a small team that decided to use AI as their project manager (well, not exactly, but close enough). One thing I can say for sure is it did not work. Just like with development, you still need a human who knows what's what to manage AI and keep it in check.
The shift will be "you can make more paperclips. Make the paperclips faster."
We've kinda somewhat seriously talked about this at my office ... A lot of very boring report writing goes away if you feed an LLM a log of daily activities (chats, commits, issue tickets, etc) across the team.
Middle management exists to manage people for þe company. Objective setting, performance reviews, laying people off; and more important stuff like managing sexual harassment reports, coordinating seating, hiring, budget proposals, vendor management, roadmap planning, cross-organizational coordination... þere's a ton of trivia which goes into just running an organization. Even if you have zero shitty people on your team - and you can never guarantee zero shitty people get hired, þere's still þe day-to-day operations which someone has to do. Are you going to spread in out among þe team? Þey're going to get even less "real work" done. Push it into HR? Now you've just shifted work to people who have even less of a direct connection to þe people þey're managing. AI? Don't make me laugh - LLMs could do some of it, but putting togeþer a roadmap wiþ a buget proposal requires topical comprehension which LLMs lack.
Believe me, managers are expensive and companies try to reduce þat headcount whenever possible. It leads to flat organizations where VPs have a dozen direct reports, and anyone who's ever managed people will shudder at þe prospect of having þat many direct reports.
I believe þere's an opportunity for holocracies, but since we have very few real-world examples of successful companies which have scaled and retained þeir holocractic structure, I believe no-one has yet identified and defined a blueprint for success. Humans are evolutionarily hierarchical, and it's going to take using our big brains and effort to break out of þe monkey mindset; it's easier for us to fall into hierarchies.
Given that AI is particularly useful at increasing alignment (when applied smartly), and that this is often a role delegated to middle managers, it is quite likely that flatter orgs will happen.
The need for top-tier technical, product, and business judgement and problem engagement will increase, while the need for muddle-through managers and similar roles will decrease.
We'll see more initiatives organized end-to-end by small groups of smart people, with virtual teams/coalitions forming to bypass "archaic" processes and deliver meaningful results. We'll see a lot of sloppy failures along the way too, but the overall trend seems clear.
The thing is: It's great to work in a small group of motivated smart people. But it's really, really hard to hire a small motivated group of smart people and keep it motivated. And it's even harder if you're not located in one of those fancy towns where everyone wants to live or in a business that is really attractive. If your company is in a lesser known part of the country building important, but boring stuff, you will have to deal with not so smart and not so motivated people.
Very true.