I. Introduction: The Dual Forces of Change
Middle management is standing at a crossroads. On one hand, artificial intelligence is advancing with unprecedented speed, now capable of handling tasks once reserved for human intellect—drafting documents, analyzing data, even making strategic recommendations. On the other hand, a new wave of organizational redesign is sweeping through enterprises, breaking down traditional hierarchies in favor of agile, self-directed teams.
Together, these forces are dismantling outdated notions of what managers do—and revealing a new role that is less about approvals and oversight, and more about coaching, catalyzing, and creating value at scale.
As Chris Hyams, CEO of Indeed, stated recently at the 2025 Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit, “The good news is that there’s not a single job anywhere that AI can perform all of the skills required for that job.” He emphasized that while AI won't entirely replace jobs, it will significantly transform them. For middle managers, this transformation is less a threat and more a blueprint for evolution. The future belongs to those who can adapt quickly, leverage new tools effectively, and empower others to do the same.
This article explores how companies are redefining management in the AI era—and what it takes to stay relevant, human, and impactful in a workplace being rewired from the ground up.
II. What AI Is Actually Doing to Work
The fear that AI will wipe out entire professions is widespread—but not entirely accurate. According to data presented by Indeed at the 2025 Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit, generative AI can perform many individual tasks very well, but it cannot perform all the tasks required for any one job.
That distinction matters. It means that wholesale job elimination is not the most likely scenario. Instead, job transformation is. In roughly two-thirds of all jobs, more than 50% of the tasks can already be performed by generative AI with reasonable to high proficiency. These include writing, summarizing, scheduling, researching, and even elements of decision-making.
For middle managers—who often juggle communication, coordination, reporting, and approvals—AI is beginning to absorb the routine and repetitive elements of the role. Think: auto-generating team status updates, analyzing KPI dashboards, or even drafting performance review feedback. What’s left is the strategic, interpersonal, and creative work that AI can’t yet touch.
But this isn’t just about subtracting tasks. The bigger shift is that AI raises the expectation of speed and adaptability across all functions. If a task used to take two hours and now takes two minutes with AI, the benchmark moves. And so must the manager.
Rather than asking, “What can AI do instead of me?”, today’s middle managers must ask, “What can I do now that AI handles the rest?”
III. The Decline (and Reinvention) of Middle Management
For decades, middle management functioned as the connective tissue of large organizations—approving requests, translating strategy, managing performance, and ensuring compliance. But that structure, once seen as essential, is now being reexamined in the face of both AI-driven efficiency and changing workforce expectations.
Bayer Pharmaceuticals offers a striking example. In a bold move, the company eliminated 40% of its U.S. middle management roles and replaced them with self-directed teams operating in 90-day sprints. The results? A 23% increase in business growth in North America, with the U.S. contributing even more than the reported regional average.
The shift wasn’t just about headcount reduction. It was a rethink of what management is for. Bureaucratic layers—where decisions passed upward through chains of command—were replaced with autonomous teams empowered to act on their own insights. Tasks like expense report approvals, which once consumed significant managerial bandwidth (Bayer processed 120,000 of them annually), were eliminated or automated.
Yet not all managers were dismissed. Many were reassigned as individual contributors, retaining their compensation but shedding administrative responsibilities. Freed from bureaucratic drag, they reported greater job satisfaction and impact.
At the same time, the role of managers who remained was transformed. No longer expected to police processes, these leaders now serve as coaches, catalysts, and architects of team success. It’s a shift from managing compliance to enabling performance.
In short, middle management isn’t disappearing. It’s being rewired for a world where decisions must be faster, roles more fluid, and leadership more empowering than ever before.
IV. What Forward-Thinking Companies Are Doing Right
Companies that thrive in this era of AI and organizational agility are not relying on top-down edicts alone. While leadership plays a crucial role in setting direction, real adoption happens from the bottom up—driven by curiosity, experimentation, and internal champions.
At Indeed, CEO Chris Hyams shared the story of “Bob,” a frontline engineer who dove headfirst into AI tools when they were introduced to the team. While others hesitated, Bob experimented, found practical uses in his coding workflow, and began sharing short demo videos with colleagues. His informal tutorials sparked curiosity across the team, leading to broader adoption—not through mandates, but through relatable, peer-driven momentum.
Meanwhile, at OpenAI, Chief People Officer Julia Villagra outlined three foundational moves for building an AI-curious culture:
Hiring with AI literacy in mind—embedding a baseline understanding of AI into interview processes.
Modeling adoption through leadership—leaders using AI personally to demonstrate its practical value.
Creating structured spaces to experiment—from hackathons to interdepartmental competitions, even onboarding debates about AI’s pros and cons.
This type of culture doesn’t just help employees learn AI—it lowers fear, boosts creativity, and sparks momentum.
In both cases, the lesson is clear: the future is built by those who are allowed to play with it. AI success isn’t about compliance—it’s about curiosity, confidence, and the freedom to experiment safely.
V. Rethinking Culture and Compensation
As AI reshapes workflows and organizations flatten hierarchies, one of the most delicate challenges is cultural: how do you reward people when titles and headcount no longer define value?
Historically, many middle managers moved “up” the ladder as a natural career path—often to gain recognition, responsibility, and compensation. But in flatter, AI-enhanced organizations, the ladder is becoming a lattice. At Bayer, those who transitioned from managerial roles to individual contributors did not take pay cuts. Their compensation remained intact because the value they brought to the organization hadn’t diminished—only their administrative burden had.
This signals a profound shift: performance and growth are no longer tied exclusively to the number of people managed. Instead, careers are being reconceived as “T-shaped”—where depth of expertise (the vertical) and breadth of experience (the horizontal) both matter. Leadership is just one of many pathways.
Equally important is the cultural narrative. In companies where management roles were once seen as the only route to recognition, removing those roles without redefining success can feel like erasure. That’s why forward-looking organizations are investing in new signals of progress: project ownership, peer recognition, cross-functional impact, and personal development.
This rethink is especially critical for younger generations entering the workforce. They expect transparency, purpose, and advancement that reflects skill growth, not just title inflation. And they’re often more excited by autonomy and learning than traditional power.
The new culture doesn’t say, “We don’t need managers.” It says, “We recognize and reward contribution—wherever it happens.”
VI. New Skills in the Age of AI
If AI is automating routine tasks, what’s left for humans? The answer, increasingly, is: everything AI can’t do well.
This includes the so-called “soft skills” that are, in reality, mission-critical. Emotional intelligence. Listening. Framing conflict constructively. Cross-functional collaboration. These skills have always mattered—but in flatter, faster organizations, they’ve become non-negotiable.
As middle managers shift from task supervisors to team catalysts, they must develop new interpersonal fluency. It’s no longer about controlling workflow; it’s about creating clarity, cohesion, and culture—often across geographies, time zones, and functions. AI may write the memo or generate the project plan, but it still takes a human to read the room.
Platforms like Medley, which provide group coaching experiences, have seen rising demand for leadership development centered on these human-centric capabilities. Similarly, at OpenAI, new hires participate in AI-themed debates during onboarding—not just to learn the tools, but to learn how to think critically about technology’s role in their work.
The new environment doesn’t just reward people who use AI. It rewards those who can:
Ask better questions
Facilitate better dialogue
Translate complexity into shared understanding
Lead teams through ambiguity, not away from it
And just like technical skills, these human skills can be taught, practiced, and improved. In fact, they must be.
Because in a world where AI is a co-pilot, being deeply human is no longer optional—it’s your edge.
VII. Leadership’s New Narrative
In times of disruption, what leaders say—and how they say it—can determine whether change is met with momentum or mutiny.
Too often, AI initiatives are framed in cold, mechanical terms: efficiency, productivity, cost savings. But to those on the receiving end, that message often lands as: “We’re trying to get more out of you with less.” It breeds anxiety, not engagement.
Contrast that with a narrative rooted in empowerment: AI as a tool to unlock creativity, free up time for meaningful work, and deepen human connection. At Indeed, Hyams cautioned against viewing AI as just a cost-cutting lever. Instead, he urged companies to focus on how these tools can expand impact—both for the organization and the individual.
At Bayer, this shift in story was essential. Middle management wasn’t eliminated because it was wasteful—it was reimagined because its potential was underutilized. Managers didn’t vanish; they evolved into architects of autonomy, designers of culture, and stewards of distributed leadership.
This new narrative requires leaders to embrace something uncomfortable: vulnerability. To admit that the best ideas might not come from the top. To let go of control and trust teams to own outcomes. And to model the very adaptability they ask of others.
That kind of leadership isn’t about charisma or command. It’s about clarity, curiosity, and courage.
And it’s the only kind that will survive the pace of change AI is unleashing.
VIII. Conclusion: The Tipping Point
We are not watching a future unfold—we are standing in the middle of it. AI is no longer an experiment, and organizational agility is no longer a theory. Together, they are reshaping the workforce in real time, especially for middle managers.
What once made someone valuable—approval authority, process control, layers of oversight—is rapidly being replaced by what makes someone indispensable: empathy, adaptability, and the ability to lead when no one’s looking.
And here’s the truth I keep coming back to: this isn’t about replacement. It’s about redefinition. We’re not removing people—we’re re-centering their purpose. The job isn’t to manage bodies or boxes. It’s to clear paths, build trust, and amplify what humans do best.
I’ve seen this firsthand in the organizations I work with, and I’ve felt it in my own career. The moment I stopped trying to prove control and started focusing on how to empower others—the work got better, the results got stronger, and I found myself enjoying the ride more than ever.
The middle manager isn’t obsolete. They’re overdue for a renaissance.
And the leaders who embrace that now—who choose reinvention over resistance—won’t just survive the AI era. They’ll help shape what work becomes next.
#FutureOfWork #AILeadership #MiddleManagement #OrgDesign #WorkplaceTransformation #AICulture
As organizations reshape themselves around AI, agility, and distributed decision-making, there’s one foundation that must evolve in parallel: cyber infrastructure.
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If management is being rewired, CIS is the wiring.
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About Tech Topics
Tech Topics is a newsletter with a focus on contemporary challenges and innovations in the workplace and the broader world of technology. Produced by Boston-based Conceptual Technology (http://www.conceptualtech.com), the articles explore various aspects of professional life, including workplace dynamics, evolving technological trends, job satisfaction, diversity and discrimination issues, and cybersecurity challenges. These themes reflect a keen interest in understanding and navigating the complexities of modern work environments and the ever-changing landscape of technology.
Tech Topics offers a multi-faceted view of the challenges and opportunities at the intersection of technology, work, and life. It prompts readers to think critically about how they interact with technology, both as professionals and as individuals. The publication encourages a holistic approach to understanding these challenges, emphasizing the need for balance, inclusivity, and sustainability in our rapidly changing world. As we navigate this landscape, the insights provided by these articles can serve as valuable guides in our quest to harmonize technology with the human experience.