Conscious unbossing

Companies are cutting middle management positions at rates not seen in years. And they’re using AI as the excuse

ARGUABLY THE WORST spot to be on the org chart right now is in middle management, bearing the brunt of the AI-era layoffs — middle managers made up nearly a quarter of all job cuts in 2025.

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And somehow, arguably the best place to be in seven to 10 years might be the now-gaping hole where middle management used to be, says one study, casting some doubt on the current middle-manager purge in the economy: Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce projects the U.S. will be short 2.9 million managers by 2032 — bigger than nurses and teachers combined.

Everywhere you look, middle managers are being handed their walking papers. Uber axed about 3,300 employees this month, mostly middle managers; Intel halved its management layers from 12 to six; Google cut small-team managers by 35 per cent. Coinbase told staff there would be no more “pure managers” (managers should be like “player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams,” wrote CEO Brian Armstrong); and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky doubted “people managers will have any value in the future.”

 

There are middle manager defenders in the wild, some who see the current assault on the middle layer a hit to a unique asset class in many firms, seeing smartness and not bloat when they look at middle management.

“Management is sort of a unique category in that there isn’t a single pipeline that gets you there,” said policy analyst Madeleine Adelson, co-author of the Georgetown Workforce & Skills Shortage Report. “That can work both for and against it.”

The common narrative is that middle managers are the layer at many companies where AI is having the most impact. But whether any of this is really about AI is a fair question. Uber’s layoff memo talked about “layers” and “complexity” but never once mentioned AI, suggesting its hostility towards middle management is, whatever else you think of it, arrived at organically.

“There’s a bit of AI washing,” said Toby Walsh, chief scientist at the UNSW AI Institute. “A company that’s been perhaps not very well managed, and rather than saying that we’ve been poorly managed, they’ve been saying: ‘Well, we’re investing in AI.’’

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So, maybe it’s AI, or maybe it is firms fighting the spectre of thinning margins by taking, as laid-off Uber legal counsel Alex Butterworth put it, “a sledgehammer to the organization and put the pieces back together later.”

Either way, we’re probably going to miss them, argue critics of the middle manager purge. The pipeline is already drying up. About half of Gen Z workers say they never want to rise to middle management, and you can’t really look at the current economy and blame them. “Where are those middle managers and higher managers going to come from?” asks Walsh. “Where are they going to learn about the business?”

All of this has The Wall Street Journal’s Callum Borchers predicting a middle manager renaissance in a few years. “Get ready for the in-demand middle managers’ comeback tour in a few years’ time. The only question is, when companies realize they cut too deeply, will there be enough bosses willing and able to step up?” Kieran Delamont