When will managers be replaced by AI?

I think you might not get serious responses, but I think this is an interesting question since I think AI is a better fit for management than many other jobs.

Nobody would have believed it 10 years ago, but today AI is more likely to replace a concept artist than an accountant, so it's not beyond imagination to replace a manager even if the ICs are still human.

AI excels at summarization, which is a big part of the job for a lot of managers. They gather information, go to meetings, write reports, and generally re-share information appropriate for whatever audience.

At a lot of companies, the lowest level managers don't make a lot of decisions either. Tech leads make technical decisions, PMs make product decisions, and the skip-levels (e.g. Directors, VPs) make staffing decisions.

In practice, I don't think humans will report to AIs, but hierarchies might flatten (e.g. ICs report to Directors) and responsibilities might get shuffled around (e.g. some duties get assigned to HR).

If the workers are AI-bots, then I don't really see any skill overlap with management. If you manage only AIs, you are an IC, not management.

Guys, I think my company is literally going to try this. I'm not joking.

We fired ~1/3rd of the managers last month. We had a (poor) town hall about it with platitudes galore. I talked to my new boss (was a skip level boss before) and they were unconcerned, as we'd 'brought in a new vendor' to 'assist in the transition'. I've never heard of bringing in a single vendor to help after manager layoffs. Since I do AI stuff in the company, the remaining managers have been keen to talk with be about AI now and how to use it better. I'm not sure what is really happening (I think it's just internal politics mostly) but there is a >20% chance they're doing something this stupid.

Wish me luck, y'all.

I expect it will take a while.

Nobody really wants to decrease the number of humans in their fiefdom, right?

However, if AI actually works out and produces tools that make people, like, 5x more effective, than a software company can replace an existing one at 1/5 the cost with 1/5 the engineers. Fewer people to manage, less deep corporate tree, and maybe some of those middle layers will also use AI…

But nobody wants to decrease the size of their fiefdom, so that company will need to be built from the ground up and then wipe out the competition.

The easiest job to replace must be the CEO.

Look at Musk. He's CEO of six companies (or so), yet has time to run DOGE and constantly post on X.

Large corporations are full of middle-managers who do not lead anything nor produce anything (customer facing) and whose only job is to "facilitate information flow" and "pull teams together" etc. I think these roles will be replaced with AI chatbots quickly. The upside (for the company) ought to be that now the facilitation should happen very quickly and is measurable/manageable more directly. The downside (for the line employees) is that now your boss is a chatbot.

No one is being replaced 1:1, but everyone is going to be downsizing (and that’s mostly the same thing).

You need a lot fewer managers if your team is 5-20% what it needed to be a few years ago.

I think we need to frame this question in terms of systems, not just roles. Even in this thread, people have different definitions of manager: someone responsible for people, someone who makes decisions, someone who routes info.

So the type of management will be a big factor

Buy before Al replaces "managers," companies will (or should) rethink how their systems and workflows operate, then realign roles to match.

Instead of starting with a question of replacing roles (and some certainly will), it'll start with redefining how work gets done, and updating job descriptions accordingly.

What won't change is that employers will hire for value. So maybe while some companies would rather substitute managers with AI, I imagine many would prefer the outsized value an ai-literate manager might have

IME most managers became managers because they preferred working with and helping organize people to creative contributions. I don’t see the need for any of these functions going away. I see productivity differences. Maybe the roles evolve.

I think the real question is how do we best harness the increased productivity? Logically speaking, if each person is 5x as productive because of AI there should be an equally greater capacity to get things done. Businesses aren’t just running out of work to do, right?

Leadership is the one doing the "replacing". They won't replace themselves. They'll replace you first.

Also there's tons of science validating how the most unqualified and unfit people make it to leadership positions. If you're a leader, most likely you're not a good one. So it's not like the industry knows a good leader when they see it. So if AI is a better manager, the industry doesn't care. It's politics and ass kissing that gets them up there.

Replacing managers with AI was the premise of Manna: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

I'm still trying to decide what I'm gonna do the first time a company tries to have their AI Bot interview me for a job. Will I accept that offer or reject the interview? I'm undecided. I'll probably refuse.

However I think an AI would maybe be more honest, about how well I do and my super high skill level perhaps, and not simply reject people for being over 50, White, Male, Overqualified, and good looking, as is [or dare I say was] the custom with DEI hiring practices, for the last decade...or two.

Managers are the parasitic class, so they will take the company down with them, and will never be replaced. One can however start a new firm without them and without AI. All you need is to measure commits and communications to know if someone is working and how they should be organized. It doesn't even require AI.

To replace the mangers, the AI needs to take care of the following pain points (got some help from chatgpt): Hiring and Talent Acquisition: - Candidate pipeline quality is inconsistent. - Time-consuming resume screening and interview scheduling. - Lack of diverse candidate pools.

Performance Management - Biased or inconsistent performance reviews. - Goal-setting lacks clarity or alignment with org OKRs. - Lack of real-time performance insights.

Project Planning and Execution - Estimations are often inaccurate. - Project scope creep due to unclear requirements. - Dependencies across teams delay execution.

Technical Debt and Code Quality - Mounting technical debt slows velocity. - Inconsistent coding standards. - Hard to trace ownership for legacy code.

Team Collaboration and Communication - Cross-team communication breakdowns. - Time zones complicate decision-making. - Meeting overload or lack of clarity post-meeting.

Onboarding and Knowledge Transfer - New hires take too long to ramp up. - Tribal knowledge isn't well documented. - Onboarding processes are inconsistent.

Incident Management and Reliability - Blameless postmortems are rarely actionable. - Alert fatigue from noisy signals. - Root cause analysis (RCA) is time-consuming.

Career Growth and Mentorship - Lack of clarity in career ladders. - Mentorship is ad-hoc and inconsistent. - Managers don’t have enough time for coaching.

Engineering Productivity Metrics - Metrics often feel punitive or misused. - Hard to attribute impact to engineers’ work. - Lack of actionable insights from engineering data.

Cross-Functional Alignment - Product and engineering priorities are misaligned. - Specs often change mid-cycle. - Lack of visibility into roadmap tradeoffs.

Each of these categories will probably need an AI agent in itself and probably an AI agent to control all the other AI agents. It would be a complex system, but will still need some monitoring until it is self-sustaining.

This entire post is exhibit A on why managers are essential and will likely not be replaced by AI any time soon.

Managers will be replaced by AI when people are willing to work for them. Does anyone really want that? Who the fuck wants to work for an unaccountable machine who you can’t grab a beer with after work? How much life are you willing to abstract away in the name of “efficiency”? To what end?

The exact same thing applies if you are a manager, do you really want a flock of loyal electric sheep to do your bidding? If you’re in management for control over others, how is that satisfying? If you’re in it to mentor, who comes after you? How?

Why does anyone want this? Our societies are already so mechanized and automated yet somehow we have less time than the average medieval peasant to enjoy our allegedly easier lives. What toil has been eliminated thus far?

IMO Humans are better at understanding abstract things, taking into account not only technical requirements but also non-technical requirements. It would be horrible if I would need to argue with an AI about priorities, security concerns, etc.

Too many edge cases. Managers are working with people and we are complicated.

Will the AI Manager fight correctly about my promotion or my bonus? Will it make sure I have a good work-life balance? Will it considered I did an extraordinary job vs an underperforming job?

Line managers - when the majority of their teams is AI-based

Middle managers - when the line managers are gone

Senior leadership - when the middle management is gone (IF they are willing to give up their seats)

> What is the point of "leadership" when the workers are AI-bots?

This is a weird question. If the team below a manager is replaced by AI, then quite obviously there is nothing else to manage. The real question is: can AI replace the teams?

Then of course, if there is a reduction in workforce, there may be a reduction of the number of teams and hence of the number of managers for those teams.

> competent prompt engineers

Writing prompts is not engineering.

I hope soon. I hate managing people. If a bot can do all the HR busywork that would be fantastic.

Just now I'm recirculating for the 2nd time a quote for a laptop that admin sent back to me because it had a tiny detail wrong, and then by the time I did the 2nd submission the quote expired. And this is about 1% of the beauracracy to get a new employee started in my org.

I think the answer is obvious that nobody is being replaced by AI.

The real concern should be that telling entry level workers they need to be prompt engineering experts on top of everything else is stupid. We're only making it harder to hire the right people.

We should be focusing on whether someone can get the job done regardless of what strategies they prefer to research a solution.

Time to read or reread https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

The only reason managers exist is because of their power to fire people. They are essentially clerks that "coordinate" work, as if work needs that much coordination.

A manager has responsibility for the team, how can an AI be responsible?

Well, we are almost half-way through the year since this prediction [0] and the full assault on knowledge workers is underway (as expected) and is replacing them with AI via mass layoffs across the tech industry and beyond and it is the complete endgame of the intelligent age.

You will see this magnified by this year's Google I/O announcements.

Anytime they mention "AGI", it really is the goal of AI replacing humans from their jobs that are economically useful. (Not the benefit of humanity bullshit.)

In 10 - 15 years time, the questions from those who got out of tech would be:

Did you that humans used to program computers?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490692

I think we can replace congress members with AI who simply take prompts of their constituents en masse and vote for bills in favor of their desires.

hello,

as always: imho. ...

idk. ... what do you mean by "managers" in your question!?

in my view: the "real" task of mangers - regardless of the level, but even more if they are at a lower/mid level - is managing peoples & their expectations - either of their "team" or their superior.

and looking at the current state of "AI", i don't see much gain in using it to manage those part of "management".

but i think (current) "AI" would be a good source of "additional" decision/reasoning over the lets call it "technical parts" of mgmt ...

sure, this will change in the future, but currently i don't see much on the horizon regarding the "peoples" part of mgmt.

but in the medium/long term, i could imagine a development somewhat similar to the following:

looking at the progression of neo-liberal capitalism: using / blaming AI for unfavorable (mgmt)decisions may be a good possibility to "hide" behind said AI to enforce such "unpopular" decision.

they would have been made anyways, but using this pattern "nobody" is responsible for such developments, because "AI said so" etc...

just my 0.02€