Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
For decades, companies leaned on the traditional pyramid: a wide foundation of junior staff, a slimmer tier of middle managers, and a focused group of leaders at the top. But now, AI is accelerating a push toward flatter hierarchies and redrawing organizational charts. In some cases, it’s flipping them upside down.
Two significant changes are driving this transformation: the quick decline in early-career roles and the reduction of middle management.
Together, these trends raise a crucial question for the future of work: what happens when AI can take over the tasks, but companies remove the very layers that ensured long-term adaptability?
Fewer Doors for Early-Career Talent
Industries across the board are cutting back on entry-level hiring, a trend that would have seemed improbable not long ago. LinkedIn data indicates a 30% drop in entry-level job listings from early 2024 to early 2025, following a previous 23% decline since 2020.
This pattern is showing up in sectors traditionally known for hiring graduates in large numbers — finance, tech, media, and law.
These same fields are among those most impacted by generative AI. However, current evidence suggests that economic pressures, rather than AI alone, are driving the slowdown.
Still, concern is growing. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently warned of “sleepwalking into mass unemployment,” estimating that up to 50% of entry-level knowledge work could be automated within five years.
Faced with this, some leaders have begun to question the need for early-career positions at all. If AI can handle summarizing reports, scrubbing datasets, fielding customer queries, and writing initial drafts, what’s the point of hiring junior staff?
From a short-term, task-efficiency lens, this may seem practical. But from a broader perspective, it’s a miscalculation. Entry-level roles serve as the foundation for future leaders. They are critical for building institutional knowledge, developing judgment, and maintaining a healthy talent pipeline.
Shrinking that foundation limits an organization’s capacity to grow and evolve.
When efficiency becomes the only metric, companies risk eroding their long-term resilience.
The Quiet Exit of Middle Managers
At the same time, another critical layer is eroding: middle management. With AI rising in capability, it has become popular to question whether managers are still necessary.
At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg described redundant layers as “managers managing managers managing managers.” Amazon’s Andy Jassy, known for his aversion to bureaucracy, has led efforts to increase employee-to-manager ratios across the board.
The numbers echo this sentiment. Revelio Labs reports a 40% drop in middle-management job postings since 2022. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 20% of companies will use AI to flatten their hierarchies, cutting over half of their mid-tier roles.
This approach is no longer limited to Silicon Valley — banks, retailers, and consulting firms are all slimming down their structures to reduce overhead and speed up decision-making.
But assuming managers are irrelevant is a flawed conclusion. Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends report underscores what remains when admin tasks are automated: managers still coach, develop people, resolve conflict, make judgment calls, and translate strategy into action. They bring clarity amid uncertainty and foster cohesion in times of change.
In other words, they are vital when it comes to navigating ambiguity and leading through disruption.
In AI-powered environments, these human-centric skills become even more essential. Middle management is where strategies take shape, where teams learn to work together, and where new roles and processes are defined.
AI might handle routine tasks, but it cannot replace human intuition, conflict mediation, or decision-making that depends on context.
When companies strip away both junior roles and mid-level managers, they risk building brittle structures that falter under stress. AI may redefine work, but people are still the ones who adapt roles and steer transformation.
Building a Workforce That Can Withstand Change
Rather than letting AI hollow out their organizations, companies need to rethink their architecture entirely.
Beamery’s “Inside the Human–Machine Economy” proposes a new model: a pentagon-shaped workforce, designed to be more stable and adaptive than the traditional pyramid.
In this structure, three core layers support a more resilient system: a strong base of early-career professionals gaining the context AI cannot replicate; a robust middle layer that drives execution, collaboration, and growth; and a sharper, more focused top making strategic decisions.
This design avoids the weaknesses of a flattened hierarchy.
AI could, in fact, force the need for new organizational structures. Or it could change the nature of the work within each existing layer. Regardless of where we land, redesigning the work shouldn’t be a top-down exercise.
The best insights come from those closest to the job — people who know where human judgment, nuance, and emotional intelligence matter most. Only people can define what really matters, how value is created, and what makes a workplace truly thrive in the future.
