Written by Dr. Melik Peter Khoury
Flat orgs promise speed. AI promises automation. Put them together without serious middle management and you do not get scale. You get drift.
The future will not be flat. AI may erase busywork, but it cannot automate coherence – At least not yet. Scale belongs to leaders with the backbone to hold complexity together. And if AI ever changes to the point where this is wrong, then we will have built a scalable organization prepared to adapt.
Traditional executives love to talk in horizons. Entry level teams live in tasks. The distance between them either gets bridged by capable managers or it turns into friction, duplication, and underperformance. The hot take that middle management is a waste sounds bold until you try to scale anything beyond a small stable operation.
What AI really changes
The best current research says from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), AI shifts which tasks humans do, not the entire job itself. In multiple field studies, AI tools raised productivity with the biggest gains for less experienced workers, who moved down the learning curve faster when guided by AI. One widely cited experiment found about a 14 percent output lift for contact center agents, with the strongest effects for newer staff. The technology captured playbooks from top performers and spread them across the team. It did not remove the need for managers. It changed what good managers manage.
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