AI Won't Save a Bad Manager
“With AI , we don’t need managers anymore.” - everyone, 2025
“AI will flatten the org chart.”
“Everyone becomes their own manager.”
“Managers are overhead.”
I understand why that idea was popular. If you’ve had a bad manager, it sounds like freedom. But it mistakes one skill for the whole job.
When most people say “manager,” they mean “people manager.” That’s one pillar but I believe there’s six: People, Execution, Communication, Collaboration, Organization, and Finance.
Every one of those six is exactly what working with AI demands.
1. People: the price of admission. This is the pillar everyone “knows,” but it still matters. If your team doesn’t trust you, nothing downstream works. But it’s the baseline skill, not the whole game.
2. Execution. Delivery still decides everything. Someone has to figure out what done looks like, pick the tools, and get the work delivered. AI can draft, code, and plan. Unless your product is pure software, AI is still not carrying the work across the finish line. That’s you.
3. Communication. Someone has to define what needs to be done. Someone has to report that it’s done. Someone has to sell it. Whether that means winning an internal sponsor or meeting a market need, the work of asking, telling, and selling doesn’t go away. AI may help you say it better, but it can’t decide what’s worth saying.
4. Collaboration. Look at the agent skills being built right now. Skills for marketing. Skills for design. Skills for coding. Skills for strategy. What is that, really? It’s team-building. Figuring out who does what best is a collaboration problem, whether “who” is a person or an agent. And in most companies, the team will stay matrixed. Maybe you’ll have more people than AIs, but most of those people will be using AI. Guess what. Someone has to make that mix work.
5. Organization. Breaking down the work and deciding which team owns what. Even model selection is an organization call: do you put the premium model on this task, or the cost-effective one? That’s a “staffing” decision. Managers have been making staffing decisions forever.
6. Finance. It still takes money to get anything done, AI or no AI. And AI will chew through a budget if you let it. Spend it like it’s your own money, because eventually somebody will ask what it bought.
AI amplifies the other five pillars, and it raises the floor for everyone. A strong communicator with AI communicates faster. A strong organizer with AI organizes more. Which means if your entire value as a manager is being good with people, the gap between you and someone strong across all six just got wider. People skills get you in the door, but the other five will decide how far you go.
So no, I don’t think AI makes managers obsolete. I think it makes the manager skill set the single best investment you can make. Getting better at these six makes you better with AI and better with people at the same time.
Same skills, but a bigger lever.
See you next week!
-Frank
