No middle management, no middle class?

No middle management, no middle class?

FOBO (fear of becoming obsolete) has been picking up a lot of momentum, particularly with middle management in large companies. I hear it in every boardroom and town hall: a palpable anxiety that these supervisors will soon be erased by the encroaching tide of automation.

We're not talking about a small group. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, middle managers now constitute roughly 21 million American workers, earning between $76K and $128K depending on industry and location. Now think through all of the associated college loans, mortgages, and car payments.

This week, those concerns found a new accelerant, as a thought piece asking a deceptively simple question went viral: What if those roles are no longer needed in the age of AI?

The authors aren't fringe provocateurs; they are Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Block, and Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital and former CFO of PayPal.  

They argue we are witnessing the end of a 2,000-year-old experiment. For centuries, we utilized a military-grade "line and staff" pyramid-style hierarchy because it was the only way to route information through a pre-digital world. Middle management was the human copper wiring of the enterprise; their primary job was the manual processing and coordination of data.

Today, that wiring is obsolete. We are moving from a world of Hierarchy to a world of Intelligence.

In this new "intelligent" operating system, AI doesn't just assist the manager; it replaces the coordination function entirely. When information can route itself and agents can execute multi-step workflows across the stack, the traditional "command and control" structure doesn't just slow you down, it becomes a competitive liability.

This has significant implications which are showing up in real time.  For example, just last week Oracle laid off 18% of its 162,000 employees to reinvest in their AI infrastructure.  And Nelson Peltz, the famed activist investor, is taking Janus Henderson private with plans to transform the $493 billion asset manager along these lines.  

The question is no longer whether middle management will be restructured. It's who will shape what comes next, and whether those 21 million workers will have a seat at that table, or simply receive a 6:00 AM email telling them the table no longer exists.