Meta and Block Are Eliminating Middle Managers. AI Is Taking Over Their Work.
Meta and Block are stripping out traditional middle-management layers and replacing them with AI-assisted roles and flatter structures. The shift signals a deliberate attempt to reorganize how large tech companies operate.
Mark Zuckerberg says a single engineer equipped with AI can now do the work of an entire team. Jack Dorsey wants to reduce layers between himself and Block's 6,000 employees from five to two or three this year, with an ultimate goal of eliminating them entirely.
Meta's Reality Labs unit has already started replacing manager titles with labels like "AI builder," "pod lead," and "org lead" as part of a push toward becoming what the company calls "AI-native." Block has stopped using the word "manager" in job postings altogether, rebranding those roles as "player-coaches" who build alongside their teams rather than overseeing them.
The Data Shows a Deliberate Shift
Job postings for middle-management roles dropped 12.3 percent in 2025 compared to 2024, according to Indeed data. That decline outpaces the overall softening in job listings, suggesting companies are specifically targeting the managerial layer.
The reasoning is straightforward: every layer between a decision-maker and the person executing adds friction and delays feedback. Google and Amazon have periodically culled managerial ranks over the past decade on this logic.
What has changed is that AI now offers a credible replacement for the coordination work managers traditionally handled. Scheduling, status tracking, performance assessments, and resource allocation are tasks that large language models can increasingly manage on their own.
History Offers Caution
Zappos famously adopted holacracy in the 2010s, eliminating traditional managers and job titles in favor of self-organizing circles. The experiment failed. Turnover spiked, key executives left, and the company struggled to maintain strategic direction. Zappos eventually reversed many elements of the system.
Chris Kaufman, a cofounder of StockX and leadership consultant, is skeptical that rebranding managers solves structural problems. He compares it to "moving the peas to the corn compartment in a TV dinner"-cosmetic change without real substance.
Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill offers a different concern. Small, cross-functional teams can accelerate work, but they still need what she calls "bridgers"-people who facilitate collaboration across groups with different expertise. Remove that connective tissue entirely, and you risk creating efficient silos that cannot align on shared goals.
What Managers Should Actually Do
For leaders watching these experiments, the takeaway is not to eliminate every manager tomorrow. Instead, audit what your managers actually spend time doing.
If the answer is mostly coordination, scheduling, and report generation, AI can likely take on a significant portion of that work today. Managers can focus on what machines cannot yet do well: coaching talent, resolving interpersonal conflicts, and making judgment calls about trade-offs.
The companies that succeed will not simply eliminate layers. They will redesign roles around what humans do best and let machines handle the rest. The ones that fail will find that flat organizations without strong connective leadership do not move faster. They fracture more quietly.
For managers navigating this shift, understanding AI for Management roles and how to adapt your skill set is increasingly critical. Those who can transition from pure oversight to strategic coaching and cross-functional collaboration will remain essential.
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