Artificial intelligence could soon eliminate the need for traditional middle management roles, according to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. The warning comes just weeks after his financial technology company Block Inc. announced plans to cut around 4,000 jobs, roughly 40% of its workforce, as part of a broader shift towards smaller teams and greater use of artificial intelligence.
In a blog post titled 'From Hierarchy to Intelligence', co-authored with former Sequoia managing partner Roelof Botha, Dorsey argued that AI could take over many of the coordination and communication tasks currently handled by middle managers. He believes organisations may no longer need a permanent middle management layer as AI becomes a core part of the workforce.
Most companies are structured like pyramids, where information flows up from employees to managers and then to executives, before decisions move back down the chain. Middle managers typically track progress, coordinate projects, share updates and ensure teams remain aligned. However, Dorsey argues that AI can now perform many of these tasks faster and at a much larger scale.
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According to Dorsey, artificial intelligence can maintain what he calls a real-time “world model” of a company, essentially an always-updated map of what is happening across the organisation. This system could track workflows, identify problems, route tasks and share information instantly, reducing the need for human intermediaries.
Notably, Dorsey is already testing this approach within Block, the company behind products such as Square and Cash App. The company processes millions of transactions daily, giving it access to vast amounts of data that can be used to train AI systems to better understand business operations and customer behaviour.
Under Dorsey's proposed structure, companies would move away from traditional reporting hierarchies and instead rely on three types of roles: individual contributors, directly responsible individuals (DRIs), and player-coaches. Individual contributors would act as deep specialists, DRIs would own specific cross-functional problems, and player-coaches would focus on both building products and mentoring teams.
In this model, AI would handle the coordination layer that managers traditionally oversaw, providing real-time context and direction across the organisation. Dorsey argues that by removing permanent middle management roles and relying on AI-driven coordination, companies could operate faster, make decisions more efficiently and significantly improve productivity.
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