Anupam Mittal, a popular judge on Shark Tank India, weighed in on the growing uncertainty of job loss with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). Mittal, who is also the founder of People Group, argued in a LinkedIn post that AI is not stealing jobs from coders but could be risky for middle managers.
Calling it the “bitter truth”, Mittal said that in the old world, middle management was at the fore because they knew the process, knew the right people and coordinated work between teams.
“Seniority was a proxy for knowing the process and coordinating the work. You got paid to know who to call and how to get things done. That knowledge premium is now zero,” he said.
Mittal added that AI can now handle much of this coordination and information processing more quickly and cheaply, meaning the special value managers once had is disappearing.
He mentioned that roles like “VP of Operations” could be the first to be cut, and that the future belongs to those who can build and code with Gen AI.
“I’ve invested in companies doing 300-1000 million ARR with around 50 employees and a bunch of AI agents. The ‘VP of Operations’ who doesn’t actually run anything is an endangered species.
The future in my opinion belongs to “Individual Contributor Plus”.
People who can build, code, create, align or sell – using AI to do the work of a 20-person team.
Sure, AI isn’t the answer to everything, but it excels at non-deterministic workflows and unstructured data.
Exactly where managers once excelled.
If your job is mostly coordination, with no measurable outputs, you’re in over your head.
And in a high-interest-rate world, overhead costs are coming down,” Mittal wrote.
Amazon and Google are cutting back on middle management
Last year, tech giants Amazon and Google revealed plans to reduce their middle management teams and instead focus on hiring for specialized positions. In March, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy explained that the company’s goal is to empower employees who directly do the work, rather than relying on middle managers who often try to “put their stamp on everything” but don’t always make the best decisions.
“You add a lot of people and you end up with a lot of middle managers. And those middle managers, all with good intentions, want to put their stamp on everything,” the CEO said in an interview with Bloomberg. “So you end up with these people being in pre-meeting, meeting, pre-meeting, decision meeting and not always making recommendations and owning things the way we want that type of ownership to be,” he added.
Similarly, Google is said to have streamlined its management structure in one of its most profitable divisions, removing an entire layer of middle managers from its US ad sales team.
