Middle management exists to coordinate. When AI can do the coordinating, the layer loses its purpose.
Middle management is coming under pressure, and AI is the reason. The layer exists to coordinate. When AI can do the coordinating, the layer loses its purpose.
For decades, middle management has been a fixture of corporate life. It is the layer that collects information, organizes it, and routes it up to senior management, where the strategic decisions get made.
Two shifts are now squeezing it from both sides.
The first is at the top. AI lets senior and more experienced people get more done on their own, so they are taking on work that used to be handed down a level. Individual contribution is moving up the stack.
The second is at the base. Individual contributors are expanding their scope and their skill set in the same way.
That leaves the middle with less to do. For a long time it was the steady job, the secure career you could hold at one company for years. That job is going to be pressured, and then it is going to go away.
AI will pick up the coordination. It will pick up more and more of the reporting. And it will push that information straight to a new kind of senior executive, one who works through the data directly, with AI's help.
Put together, these pressures mean that in the next five to ten years, a large share of middle management roles will be gone. Not in one field. Across specialties, and across industries.