And the beatings go on. Meta just terminated 8,000 employees, and Cisco just cut 4,000 loose, CNBC reports . Blame AI if you will, but this kind of disruption is part of something that has been going on for decades, as any former IBM or Unisys employee will tell you. It’s part of a great flattening which continues unabated. Tech companies, because they are so fast-moving in fast-rising and fast-falling markets, have always been more vulnerable to such shifts.

Shaun Warman says as much in his latest letter , in which he documents a structural shift taking place under the feet of many companies. He calls it “The Great Flattening,” which is very appropriate. “The pyramid is becoming a plateau,” he writes. “Directors, managers, and individual contributors are “collapsing into one lead role running 25 contributors paired with persistent AI agents. Span of control jumped from 8.1 (2013) to 12.1 (2025) and is on track for ~25 by 2028.”

The organizational chart is being redrawn. “The traditional pyramid — CEO at the apex, three to four management layers descending to engineers in teams of six to eight — is being compressed from both ends. Middle management is the most visible casualty, but the cascading effect on titles, responsibilities, and career paths is more interesting than the headcount math suggests.”

Warman is spot on, except for one thing. The great flattening – or at least talk of it – has been underway for decades. Talk of flattening the pyramid started in the 1980s. As the economy evolved in the 1970s, “our belief in the ideal of the pyramid structure came tumbling down, the victim of its own outdated, top-down power structure,” wrote John Naisbitt in his 1982 work, Megatrends . A network model has evolved to take its place. “Now even the large organizations – the last champions of hierarchical structure – are questioning whether the hierarchical structure can fulfill their organizational goals.” (Again, this was written 44 years ago.)

In 1994, William E. Halal, writing in the Academy of Management Journal, observed how “highly centralized hierarchies are decomposing into de-centralized, market-driven systems. This transition from hierarchy to enterprise requires a drastic change in executive roles.” And yes, middle management was constantly taking a beating through all these flattening trends.

As the internet and web swept the world later in that decade, followed shortly thereafter by social media, the idea of managers interacting with employees as equals also took hold. Imaginative leaders even located their desks in cubicles within the main working areas of their companies to signal accessibility.

It appears middle managers continue to take the brunt of downsizings. At least 41% of employees in Korn Ferry’s 2025 Workforce survey indicated that their organization had slashed management layers.

Will things truly “flatten” with today’s AI surge? Meaning that individual employees will have more of a direct line to the CEO – or at least members of the C-suite – which whom they will interact as colleagues, versus superior-subordinate roles? Warman believes so, predicting that with fewer managers in the middle, decisions will move faster “because there are fewer escalation steps. Coordination overhead lands on the lead who now runs twenty-five people instead of seven.” And the middle steps of the career ladder – managers, directors, vice presidents, will disappear.

The problem with this is companies may be cutting off their pipelines for future senior leaders, Warman cautions. Just as replacing junior programmers with AI means a shortage of senior programmers in the near future, “eliminating their middle managers in 2026 are simultaneously dismantling the apparatus that produces senior leaders in 2028,” he warns. “The bench gets thin in two directions at once: the people who would have grown into the role are gone, and the people who might have stepped into it have decided the role is not worth wanting.”

A suddenly flattened organization “can quickly lead to employee confusion and dissatisfaction, ultimately affecting productivity,” the Korn Ferry analysts state. In their survey, they found 43% of employees say their leaders “aren’t aligned,” and 37% say the lack of managers “has left them feeling directionless.”

This lack of alignment and direction occurs as “senior executives are left to pick up the slack on top of their heavy strategic workload,” the analysts continue. “Instead of fully focusing on crucial business decisions and growth plans, now they also have responsibility for the day-to-day issues their managers handled, only with less time to deal with everything. The result is less time for strategic planning, collaboration among their peers, and communication with their direct reports.”

AI may not be quite ready to pick up the slack with this.