The obituary for middle managers is familiar. This layer, the argument goes, is an early casualty of AI. The evidence is compelling. But the larger story is the transformation of business itself, a new mode of conscious capitalism that will birth the “Meridian Manager.”
Gartner put the extinction idea into play with a projection that by 2026 one in five organizations would eliminate more than half of their middle management. The timeline has slipped; the trend has not. Such giants as Amazon, Walmart, and Microsoft are already trimming the layers between executives and the front line.
