AI isn’t coming for middle management. It’s already rearranging the job description.
The layer of people whose primary function is aggregating information, writing summaries, building decks, and “managing up” is about to feel the shift first. Not because AI is more insightful than they are, but because it’s cheaper, faster, and doesn’t need three pre-meetings to prepare for the meeting.
McKinsey’s 2023 research estimated that up to 70% of a typical manager’s time is spent on communication, coordination, and reporting. All tasks AI happens to be annoyingly good at. The economics are obvious: if a system can generate weekly reports, structure data, and draft board materials at 10% of the cost and zero marginal effort, the value proposition of an entire organisational tier starts to wobble.
The survivors won’t be the people who curate information. It’ll be the people who make decisions and the people who actually do the work. Everyone in the middle becomes infrastructure, and infrastructure only survives if it adds real leverage.
This is why PE is so interested in AI at the portfolio level. Not for the sci-fi narrative, but because labour arbitrage and organisational simplification are real levers. Take out one layer of reporting, replace it with automation, and suddenly the whole business moves faster with fewer bodies.
There’s a blunt lesson hiding inside all this. If the role revolves around PowerPoint, meetings, and forwarding emails, it’s time to build a skillset that doesn’t vanish the moment automation becomes cheaper than your salary. The market won’t wait for people to adjust.
