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Cooperative AI Within a Hollowed-out Workforce

By Frank-Jürgen Richter

July 15, 2025

While much is said about the importance of top leadership in a company, it’s important to acknowledge the essential role played by middle management, the vital link between an organization’s leaders and its frontline employees. Middle management are the bulwark of daily operations and are often the ones manifesting business strategies and goals, and communicating the company’s mission throughout the organization.

“Middle managers make an organization’s strategic purpose a reality on the ground,” said Nick Terry, managing director of Top Banana, a leadership event company. “They play a central role in managing and guiding its people. They shape the development of the next generation’s potential. They are, in short, the lifeblood of an organization.”

Although there have been occasional speculations about the demise of the middle management in the past decades, their numbers have actually grown quite substantially. In 2022, middle managers made up about 13% of the overall US workforce, up from 9.2% in 1983. Moreover, an analysis of 34 million job postings over more than a decade, reveals that the role of middle managers are also evolving, requiring more collaborative skills than supervisory ones. T

However, one area in which there is a ring of truth is the fact that middle managers face the biggest threat from emerging technologies such as AI and robotics. Generative AI (GenAI), in particular, could wipe out a number of middle management roles by speeding up and automating certain functions. Moreover, middle management tend to be where leaders look to trim costs, given their reality that these jobs tend to be well-paid and workers have some degree of power to demand flexibility and agility. As a result, in recent years, we’ve seen companies like Amazon, Meta, Salesforce, and X cut down their middle management roles.

Can AI really replace the middle management? Will replacing the middle management be fruitful for companies? And what does the future hold for the middle management? These are questions that require serious consideration to ensure that we are not preemptively wiping out middle management roles and losing key institutional talent and knowledge. Instead, we need to achieve a balance in making the most of emerging technologies with the power of human intelligence.

AI vs Middle Management

When it comes to a straight fight between AI and human managers, there’s some evidence that the technology has some advantages. For one, Gartner predicts that through 2026, 20% of organizations using AI will eliminate more than half of their current middle management roles, to realize savings from reduced labor and benefits.

Moreover, unlike AI, human managers are vulnerable to the realities of the human body, with managers possibly experiencing severe stress and burnout as they toil to meet expectations from not just senior leadership and frontline employees, but also their clients’ constant demands. A survey reveals that 7 of 10 middle managers feel overwhelmed, stressed or burned out at work, with half unable to dedicate the necessary time.

These are real challenges with no simple answers, but the survey does suggest that using AI could alleviate this burden rather than replacing managers. In fact, despite the anxieties sparked by the possible encroachment of AI into our lives, many managers view the technology with a lot of hope. The survey reveals that 76% of middle managers portray a positive attitude towards AI, trusting the emerging technology to support them in making direct reports.

Emerging technologies are also fueling the need for implementation of training and development programs for middle managers to adapt and grow in the current era. This is a much-needed development that has only slowly taken hold over the years. Adobe, for example, is using GenAI to enhance the power of imagination and artistry for its creators. Adobe has also set up an AI ethics committee to oversee the company’s AI exploration, ensuring employees benefit from it. Moreover, the company has also set up a cross-functional working group to promote, govern, and support employee efforts to implement GenAI into their workflows.

AI Limitations

All that said, AI is no cure-all. For one thing, the technology is only as good as the data it is trained on. For the AI to be good for the business, it needs to be trained on large amounts of quality data to achieve the desired results, which could be a herculean task for companies, what more smaller firms with fewer resources.

Furthermore, AI also suffers from several limitations, especially in terms of its privacy and accountability. Privacy issues around AI could occur due to sensitive data collection practices and use without permission, and AI models could inadvertently leak data. This is already happening, as we saw in the case of ChatGPT, which experienced several incidents of data leakages involving user data and even accidentally leaking Samsung’s company secrets, leading to the tool being banned from use by Samsung internally.

Relying completely on AI will be unwise and businesses need to implement a middle-approach, where they blend the capabilities of AI with human intelligence to ensure they remain competitive and fulfill their social role towards their employees and the community as a whole.

The role of AI in work, and our role in shaping that future, is one of the topics being discussed in the upcoming Horasis Global Meeting, scheduled to take place in São Paulo, Brazil, between 7 to 10 October 2025. In its 10th edition, the meeting will draw together opinions and experiences of global leaders from various backgrounds on finding cooperative frameworks to our present challenges.

Photo Caption: When it comes to a straight fight between AI and human managers, there’s some evidence that the technology has some advantages.