According to the external review, the problem with the judgment that “AI will phase out middle-level managers” is not the trend itself, but the fact that many discussions still imply that business organizations are traditional pyramid structures. According to the article, what is really weakened is not the management function per se, but the old-fashioned management that relies on the information layer.
Big companies are compressing the level.
According to the article, Gartner had previously predicted that by 2026, one fifth of the organizations would have abolished more than half of middle management positions. While the timetable has been reversed, the trend has not reversed. Large enterprises such as Amazon, Wal-Mart and Microsoft are already reducing the level of management between executives and front-line employees.
The author also cites a recent study from the Harvard Business Review, which states that with the launch of Salesforce ' s AI proxy platform such as Agentforce, a new category of responsibilities has emerged: managers are no longer simply tasking and transmitting information, but rather overseeing the operation of autonomous AI agents and dealing with judgement that the system cannot replace.
Middle level was meant to serve information transmission
According to the article, traditional hierarchical organizations are not a fixed form of an enterprise, but rather a product of an era of slow transmission of information and more costly acquisition of knowledge. Middle-level managers are important to a large extent because they have the task of uploading, coordinating processes and harmonizing implementation.
This information bottleneck was significantly weakened after AI became universal. Teams have more direct access to knowledge, analytical capacity and implementation tools, and the need for enterprises to continue to rely on multi-level transfer is reduced. By this, the author judges that AI is not just about organizational flattening, but about making the original structure itself unsuitable.
New character to connect to system
The author argues that the middle level will not disappear in the future, but will evolve into a new management role. The article calls it “Meridian Manager”, who connects organizational targets, team execution and machine systems.
According to this statement, the value of future managers is no longer derived primarily from the high or information advantage of the position, but from an understanding of the team, the client and the specific situation. They need to translate organizational goals into the way in which the AI system is implemented, while preserving human judgement at key points.
Citing the Harvard Business Review study, the article states that AI can release managers from coordination, transliteration and process follow-up matters, allowing them to invest more in judgement, situational understanding and people-to-people connections. This means that the focus of mid-level posts will shift from “control processes” to “coordination systems and people”.