You’ll notice something missing if you walk into practically any open-plan office in Austin or San Francisco these days. It’s not precisely the people. The coffee maker continues to hum, the desks remain occupied, and standing meetings continue to take place. The team lead who used to wander over at 4 p.m. is one type of person that has vanished. The manager who knew which of your children had a soccer match on Saturday wanted to know how your week was going. They have been subtly removed from the organizational chart, and something more difficult to identify has gone with them.
A portion of the story is revealed by the numbers. In 2023, middle managers accounted for almost one-third of all layoffs, and by last year, over 40% of employees reported that their company had reduced the number of managers. Before 2027, one in five companies, according to Gartner, will use AI to further flatten their organizational structures. Executives refer to it as efficiency. Some refer to it as “unbossing,” which sounds like a wellness fad but isn’t. Simply put, it’s less expensive organizational design disguised in more amiable language.
| Topic Snapshot | Details |
|---|---|
| Subject | The decline of middle management roles in corporate structures |
| Trend Name | The Great Flattening / The Great Unbossing |
| Peak Year of Layoffs | 2023 — middle managers made up roughly one-third of all corporate layoffs |
| Companies Involved | Amazon, Google, Meta, and several mid-size tech and retail firms |
| Driving Force | AI adoption, cost pressure, post-pandemic over-hiring corrections |
| Key Statistic | 41% of employees report their company trimmed management layers (Korn Ferry, 2025) |
| Future Projection | 1 in 5 businesses expected to use AI to flatten hierarchies by end of 2026 (Gartner) |
| Cultural Impact | Loss of mentorship, weakened communication flow, thinner coaching pipelines |
| Industries Most Affected | Technology, retail, financial services |
| Counter-View | Leadership experts argue middle managers are “more important than ever” |
Of course, there is a strong case for it. When middle management was at its worst, it was like a clogged pipe: a layer of human routers passing information up and down without doing much with it, status meetings about status meetings, slides being made about slides. If you believe the optimists, AI can absorb a lot of that. These days, the dashboards write themselves. You receive the summaries in your inbox prior to your request. Why spend six figures on a translator?
And yet. You can hear the other side of the story if you sit down with a recent graduate at a tech company. They no longer have the person who taught them how to deal with a challenging client. The VP who oversees the 1:1s now has fifty direct reports and hardly remembers their last name. The slow art of teaching someone how to be professional, coaching, mentoring, and conflict resolution don’t all fit neatly into a Notion template.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that the businesses making the biggest cuts are also the ones making the loudest complaints about a crisis in the leadership pipeline. Without the middle, senior leaders cannot be developed. It used to be clear. It stopped being evident somewhere between the AI hangover and the pandemic hiring boom, and now executives are silently wondering where the next generation of directors is expected to come from.
The cultural cost is more subtle and more difficult to quantify. Compared to five years ago, offices now feel transactional. Channels on Slack are colder. Faster decision-making sounds good—until you’re the one excluded. AI is a part of this. Some of it is simply the result of removing those whose official or informal role it was to keep the human element of the workplace intact.
Perhaps the optimists are correct and the flattened business—leaner, faster, with each employee acting as a mini-CEO of their own work—is the way of the future. Perhaps. However, as this develops, it seems like something is being traded away that won’t be revealed during a quarterly earnings call. Seldom does culture. It doesn’t appear until much later, usually when someone searches for it and discovers it has been gone for some time.