As tech companies pour billions into artificial intelligence bets and slash their workforces, middle managers are squarely in the crosshairs.
A trend is emerging: when tech CEOs announce that AI is making it possible to do more with fewer workers, they promise to flatten their structures by cutting away what they call unnecessary management layers and bureaucracy. Just last week, the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase laid off 14% of its workforce while gesturing to the thrill of AI-fueled, minimal-management efficiency. In doing so, it joined companies including Amazon, Block and Meta that in the last year have laid off tens of thousands of employees with a specific focus on removing management layers.
The push to thin management ranks is gaining traction, especially among companies that are rapidly adopting AI, said Anastassia Fedyk, assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. She’s studied how AI is changing workforce composition. As AI tools make it possible to shift more work from managers to their reports instead, these company’s structural changes could become more permanent, she said.
These shifts are fundamentally reshaping the roles of middle management, often requiring managers to be both supervisors and producers and vastly expanding their responsibilities. At the same time, companies are giving technology a more central role in their organizations. While the moves are expected to accelerate decision-making processes, they also could complicate jobs for everyone up and down the management chain, create new bottlenecks, reduce the benefits that stem from human interaction at work, and degrade a company’s products and services.
“The middle manager role is about to be under a lot more pressure,” said Emily Rose McRae, an analyst at business and technology insights company Gartner who studies AI’s impact on the future of work. “What that means for employees is that your job gets harder, too. When your manager doesn’t get the support they need, you don’t get the support you need.”
The trend doesn’t seem confined to tech, either: at the end of 2025, openings for middle manager jobs in the US had fallen by 42% compared with a peak in 2022, according to research from workforce data platform Revelio Labs. Considering that managers comprised 13% of the US workforce in 2022, that’s a lot of people and a lot of jobs.
“We’re all trying to figure out what middle management really means,” said Prateek Singh, a software development manager who left Meta at the end of April. “It’s like a drug trial … Eventually, we will find the right one.”
It feels like ‘the Hunger Games’
At Meta, managers started to feel pressure even before Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, most recently discussed flattening the company’s management structure during a January 2026 earnings call, according to Singh. Just a few months after Singh joined in June 2025, managers on certain teams saw their…
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