A.I. Won’t Eliminate Managers, But It Will Redefine Leadership (Dominic Ashley-Timms • 01/02/26, The Observer)
For more than a century, the prevailing management model has been one of command-and-control. Managers were expected to be the nexus of knowledge, the primary problem-solvers and the arbiters of work. Promotion into management was typically a reward for attaining technical proficiency in a particular area, creating a legion of what the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) has called “accidental managers”—individuals promoted for their knowledge but utterly unprepared for the human complexities of leadership. In the U.K. alone, the CMI estimates that 82 percent of managers receive no formal preparation or training to take on the people management aspects of their role.This is the category of manager that A.I. is coming for. The manager whose primary value lies in holding information, creating reports, assigning tasks and resolving routine problems is standing on a trapdoor. Generative A.I. and advanced analytics can now perform these functions with unprecedented speed and efficiency. Knowledge is no longer power because knowledge is ubiquitous. A recent MIT Sloan study found that access to A.I. tools increased productivity for knowledge workers by over 40 percent, largely by automating the synthesis and retrieval of information—the very tasks that once consumed a manager’s day.
Information wants to be free.