For years, warnings about artificial intelligence focused on factory workers, truck drivers, and warehouse employees.

The reality unfolding across corporate America in 2026 looks very different.

The workers increasingly finding themselves squeezed are middle managers — the supervisors, coordinators, and team leaders who sit between frontline employees and senior executives.

A recent Korn Ferry survey of approximately 15,000 professionals worldwide found that 41% of employees reported their organizations had reduced management layers over the past year. The trend has become so widespread that workplace analysts have given it a name: “The Great Flattening.”

At the center of the shift is AI’s growing ability to perform many of the tasks that traditionally justified large management structures.

Much of a middle manager’s role has historically involved collecting updates, coordinating projects, preparing reports, monitoring workflows, assigning tasks, and communicating information between executives and staff.

Increasingly, software can perform many of those functions automatically.

Modern AI systems can summarize meetings, track projects, generate reports, monitor performance metrics, organize workflows, draft communications, and provide executives with real-time operational visibility that previously required multiple layers of human oversight.

As those capabilities improve, companies are questioning whether they need as many managers as they once did.

The numbers suggest many organizations have already started answering that question.

A study by workplace-training firm Lepaya found management headcount at public companies declined 6.1% between 2022 and 2025, with major corporations including Meta, Amazon, Google, and Intel reducing management layers as they streamlined operations.

Research firm Gartner projects that through 2026, one in five organizations will use AI to flatten corporate structures, eliminating more than half of current middle-management positions.

Retail giants are moving in the same direction.

Target CEO Michael Fiddelke recently said the company had accumulated too many overlapping management layers that slowed decision-making and complicated operations.

Meanwhile, Walmart has largely frozen overall workforce growth while integrating AI tools across numerous business functions, particularly within white-collar roles.

The appeal for employers is obvious.

Fewer management layers can reduce costs, accelerate decision-making, improve communication, and create leaner organizations.

But the transition comes with risks.

The same Korn Ferry research found that 37% of employees whose managers were eliminated reported feeling less supported and less certain about organizational direction.

Nearly half of senior executives surveyed expressed concern about absorbing the additional responsibilities previously handled by middle managers.

Removing management positions does not eliminate the work those managers performed.

Coaching employees, resolving conflicts, mentoring future leaders, communicating priorities, and translating executive strategy into day-to-day execution still need to happen.

In many organizations, those responsibilities are simply being redistributed to already stretched senior leaders or junior employees who may have little management experience.

Human-resources professionals say the uncertainty has contributed to increased employee anxiety and disengagement, including a growing phenomenon known as “doomjobbing” — workers quietly searching for new opportunities while remaining employed because they are uncertain about their future within the organization.

The shift may also reshape career advancement.

For decades, middle management served as the primary pathway toward executive leadership.

Employees learned how to manage teams, oversee budgets, handle performance issues, and develop leadership skills before moving into senior positions.

As those opportunities shrink, the traditional corporate ladder becomes narrower.

Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests managers within flatter organizations often earn less than their counterparts in more traditional corporate structures while carrying broader responsibilities.

Not everyone believes middle management is disappearing entirely.

Many workplace experts argue the role is evolving rather than vanishing.

Instead of spending time on administrative coordination and reporting, future managers may focus more heavily on leadership, employee development, coaching, strategic planning, and relationship building — areas where human judgment remains difficult to automate.

Others warn companies could move too aggressively.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has cautioned that widespread adoption of AI could lead to significant disruption across white-collar professions if organizations fail to carefully manage the transition.

Critics argue that eliminating management layers too quickly may create invisible costs through weaker communication, lost institutional knowledge, reduced mentorship, and declining employee engagement.

What is clear is that the transformation is no longer theoretical.

For millions of office workers, the question is no longer whether AI will change the workplace.

The question is what happens when the middle of the organizational chart — the traditional stepping stone to leadership — becomes increasingly difficult to find.

JBizNews Desk | New York
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